May 2012
77 posts
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Since launching Google+, Google isn't interested... →
If anyone is going to buy Twitter, it certainly won’t be Google. Ever since the company rolled out Google+ in June last year, it’s been focused on delivering and iterating its own social network. Up until that point, it was looking to acquire Twitter as a way to enter the social network space. Even though many regard Google+ as a ghost town, Google has already set out to integrate all...
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The upside down logo on older Apple notebooks →
Up until the year 2000, Apple’s laptops had been sporting an Apple logo that wold appear upside down when the lid is opened. Of course, up until that moment it had not been such a big issue. The logo would appear the right way up to the person who was about to use the computer but upside down to onlookers and it wouldn’t matter one bit. And then Hollywood happened. Apple’s...
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Diet Coda takes web development to the iPad →
If you’re a web developer, on a Mac, and you’re not using Coda, what’s wrong with you? Anyway, Today Panic announced Coda 2, the long anticipated update to its highly popular web development app. With several new features and long awaited support for MySQL, Coda aims to maintain its place as the preferred app for web developers.
Speaking of which, Panic also announced Diet Coda,...
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Apple may continue offering iPhone 3GS alongside... →
Unlike other mobile phone manufacturers, Apple has always stuck to a single new model every year since the iPhone was originally released in 2007. Other companies may release five or fifteen models a year, Apple sticks to just one. However, it has elected to maintain older models up to two generations behind every year and sell them at reduced prices. As a result, it can hit lower price points...
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StatCounter's weekly data puts browser superiority...
Source: StatCounter Global Stats - Browser Market Share
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“The four most interesting projects in the last five years are Tesla, SpaceX,...”
– Steve Blank in an interview with The Atlantic. Apparently he doesn’t think that the iPhone, the App Store, and the iPad were disruptive. Or he does but forgot about them. Even so, these came from just one company, Apple, which means the major industry innovations in the last five years came...
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Why did Zynga's stock drop as Facebook's went live... →
Trading of ZNGA had to be suspended twice to ensure it didn’t collapse even further. As it turned out, it wasn’t due to or despite the symbiotic relationship that Facebook and Zynga have, the market that day was just bad overall. At close of business on Friday, NASDAQ and most of Wall Street dropped like a rock. FB itself barely managed to maintain its IPO price, closing just 0.6% up....
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Google to keep Android free and open for another... →
Were there any doubt that Google would close off Android and charge license fee for partners? It seems unbelievable but apparently to gain approval from Chinese authorities over Google’s acquisition of Motorola, the company had to make such an assurance. Amazon and a number of Chinese companies had been forking Android builds to create their own mobile operating systems and in the process,...
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Why One of Silicon Valley’s Savviest Investors Has... →
Kevin Hartz is the CEO of Eventbrite and until last year, he was an angel investor. His investment portfolio included Airbnb, Pinterest, Yammer, Flixster, and more. This year though, he’s no longer interested in investing. The reason? Investing is getting expensive and competition is high among investors.
We can’t know how much longer this abundance of capital will last, but I don’t...
We sold 22,000 ebooks in our #DayAgainstDRM celebration. Not bad, considering how other publishers think they need DRM to make people pay
— Tim O’Reilly (@timoreilly) May 5, 2012
A $100b dollar company was born solely out of the desire of a college geek to meet girls. #thoughtoftheday #motivationiseverything
— Michael Gartenberg (@Gartenberg) May 17, 2012
How do I feel about all the Flipboard clones? I’d rather be competing with 1,000 copy cats than 1,000 innovators.
— Mike McCue (@mmccue) May 11, 2012
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Microsoft is developing a service to migrate apps... →
Recognizing the lack of app recognition in its library for Windows Phone, Microsoft has been working on a way to convert data from Android apps into the same apps on Windows Phone. This method will catalog the apps you have on your Android phone and seek the same apps on the Windows Phone Marketplace and install them during set up. If no corresponding or compatible app is found, it will notify you...
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Facebook raises $16 billion in largest tech IPO... →
At $38 per share, Facebook will raise the largest round of funding through an IPO for a technology company. In just eight years, the social network will be valued at around half of Google’ current value and some in the industry are saying that the $38 per share price is actually lower than it could have been as it was reached after the company released tens of millions of more shares in the...
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WatchFacebook sets its IPO at $38 per share, giving it a $104 billion valuation. More than Disney’s $81 billion. The first time an American company reached a $100 billion valuation was Exxon in 1996, 159 years after it was founded. Facebook took eight years. The IPO makes Facebook worth more than Yahoo, Priceline, Zynga, Groupon, Netflix, AOL, and Pandora combined.
Have ideas for a startup? Submit them to Samwer... →
I swear I’m not the one behind this.
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Aviary releases SDK for Windows Phone →
Photo editing company Aviary has released a development kit for Windows Phone for other apps to use as their image editor of choice. As Windows Phone is still in its early period, Aviary hopes to become the leading partner for photo apps on the platform. The free SDK allows all sorts of applications to add photo editing components without having to build it themselves. As GeekWire noted, third...
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“I can’t think of a good reason why iOS users can’t specify third-party apps to...”
– John Gruber
Yahoo! circa 2006 felt amazing. We had the pieces and people to demolish Facebook. Fumbling every single thing since takes special talent.
— Les Orchard (@lmorchard) May 15, 2012
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Indosat customers hit 52 million, Rp672 billion... →
Tuesday had brought major milestones to Indosat, Indonesia’s second largest mobile telco by customer base. Following the appointment of veteran telco executive Erik Meijer as the commercial director or chief commercial officer, the company launched its iPhone 4S bundling program yesterday and announced that it now has 52 million customers within its networks. This amounts to a 14 percent...
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“By the time we were looking at Flickr, Yahoo was getting the shit kicked out of...”
– Unnamed Yahoo executive quoted by Mat Honan
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How Yahoo killed Flickr and lost the Internet →
Gizmodo’s Mat Honan takes a detailed and powerful look at how Flickr went from a feature of another project to an internet powerhouse before succumbing to become a curiosity caught up in corporate quagmire.
In 2005, Flickr had far and away the best social connection and discovery tools on the Internet. Remember, back then Facebook was still very much a fledgling service, one that...
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Bloomberg has all your Apple WWDC rumors in one... →
Thinner, lighter, faster, sharper, SSD-powered, retina display, redesigned MacBook Pro? Check.
More iCloud apps? Check
Mountain Lion release? Check.
iPhone in October? Check.
Retina Display iMacs? Oh.
New Apple television? Hmmm… well, almost all the rumors.
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Groupon gets a sitcom on CBS →
Seriously. WTF?
“twentysomething best friends, Evan and Rob, [who] move from their hometown of Bloomington, Indiana, to Los Angeles to begin their exciting new lives working at Groupon. Evan is having trouble breaking his old slothful habits and rather than go out after work to explore L.A. and meet new people, prefers to play online poker with his buddies back home. Rob has different plans and...
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Popular Mac QuickTime plugin Perian to be... →
Until now, if your Mac isn’t loaded with the Perian plugin for QuickTime, you’d have difficulties in playing many of the popular video formats used across the web. After six years however, it’s coming to an end. The developers behind Perian are calling it quits and will be sending the source code to GitHub or Google Code for others to play with. They are recommending MPlayer, VLC...
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Photo and video sharing coming to iCloud and iOS... →
As the competition in the cloud heats up, Apple is rumored to be preparing a major upgrade to its popular iCloud service. After languishing for over a decade under various monikers and collection of services, Apple may have just hit the right notes with iCloud. At the moment iCloud offers an email service, a cloud-based contacts list, mobile and desktop instant messaging, photo synchronization,...
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Box: The Path From Arrington’s Backyard To A... →
Box can be considered an old hand in the field of cloud storage. It has its roots in a research paper written in 2004 by Aaron Levie, co-founder of Box, who thought about storing files online so people can have their files wherever they go instead of having to email them to themselves or carry storage drives everywhere. Though the idea wasn’t revolutionary and far from new, back then few...
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Steve Wozniak sees Mark Zuckerberg as a... →
In an interview with Bloomberg TV in Sydney, Apple co-founder and chief scientist for Fusion-io Steve Wozniak answered questions about the Facebook IPO and what he thinks of Mark Zuckerberg. According to Woz, as he’s commonly known, he sees Zuckerberg as more of a combination of himself and Steve Jobs. He said, “I was thankful to have a partnership with Steve Jobs and I see Mark...
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WatchSteve Wozniak on BloombergTV
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Slashdot, SourceForge, may be up for sale →
Geeknet, Inc. (Nasdaq:GKNT), the online network for the global geek community, today announced that its Board of Directors has authorized the Company and its advisors to explore strategic alternatives with respect to its online media business, including the SourceForge, Slashdot and Freecode websites. The Company and its advisors will evaluate a range of options to maximize shareholder value,...
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Is one million users a big deal these days? →
The answer to that question depends on what you get out of that million. If it’s a million paid users from which the company or the service can derive regular revenue, of course! If it’s a million users for a free service, what do you get out of it aside from eyeballs for ads and an increasing bandwidth bill? Even the term “active users” can be scrutinized these days.
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Scott Thompson was going to sever ties with... →
Scott Thompson was making enemies even within Yahoo. Having cast 2000 people away from Yahoo and pursuing a patent litigation against Facebook, the very company that helped boost readership of Yahoo’s media properties, Thompson was going to do this:
And at a meeting several weeks ago with Microsoft, a longstanding strategic partner, Mr. Thompson warned Microsoft’s chief, Steven A. Ballmer,...
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New Yahoo CEO's first internal memo →
Yahoo may have a new CEO as of this morning but it doesn’t stop its top cheerleader Kara Swisher from obtaining Yahoo’s internal memos. She published Ross Levinsohn’s first memo as Yahoo interim CEO in which he outlined the changes to the company, what he sees in Yahoo and what he intends to do (apparently going on the offensive right away). This particular point in his memo is...
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Can we move on from old tech references? Probably... →
Who still save their files on to a floppy disk? Are there even computers that ship with a floppy disk drive anymore? Can you even still buy floppy disks? With autosave, there probably isn’t even a reason to have a save icon on the toolbar anymore. What are you going to change it to, a picture of a flash chip? A cloud?
Carbon copies. Last time I saw a carbon paper being used to duplicate...
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What Eduardo Saverin owes America. (Hint: Nearly... →
News came out last week that Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin had renounced his US citizenship last September primarily to avoid the large capital gains tax bill that he would have otherwise had to pay following Facebook’s IPO. By renouncing his US citizenship, he only had to pay an exit tax based on the value of his assets at that time. Farhad Manjoo, himself an immigrant to the US, is...
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Want to check out an entrepreneur lying through... →
allupright:
Viddy, one of many would-be “Instagram for Videos” out there, is jumping out ahead of the pack — mostly because of the blog love they’re getting, I suspect. Maybe I’m wrong. I doubt it.
Anyway, when asked about being acquired, Viddy CEO and co-founder Brett O’Brien said he wasn’t interested.
…Viddy’s service and success closely parallels that of Instagram, which was snatched up by...
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Wall Street can't keep its eyes off Mark... →
This twentysomething hacker/entrepreneur founded and runs a company worth potentially over a hundred billion dollars and somehow Wall Street is making a big fuss about what he chose to wear instead of what he’s going to do with the company once it goes public. The guy’s a billionaire and he didn’t even wear a proper suit to a White House dinner. When did Wall Street suddenly...
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GigaOm's Mathew Ingram argues against newspaper... →
Mathew Ingram ponders the rising popularity of paywalls being erected by newspaper sites and argues that the newspaper sites aren’t competing with just each other but they’re competing with everything on the Internet. Anybody now can produce news reports, deliver reviews, broadcast live events. If newspapers hide their content behind paywalls, many will turn to other sources. New York...
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Startup lessons from former XBox head Robbie Bach →
Focus on discontinuity
Differentiate through marketing and branding
Find partners who want you to be successful
Capitalize on your competitors’ mistakes
Read the full explanation on GeekWire
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Windows on ARM users need browser choice too →
Microsoft is taking its Windows platform to a new environment and with it comes new rules. Apparently Windows 8, which can run on devices powered by ARM processors, have limitations on particular apps. In this instance, the browser. Perhaps akin to how Apple limits web browsers on its iOS devices to only Safari or the WebKit engine within iOS, Microsoft is implementing something similar, and...
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Making the Internet work more like our brains →
The Internet remembers. It stores all. Well, almost all. Sometimes things get pulled down and despite the best efforts, people may not be able to find certain things online anymore because they become to obscure and hidden. The Internet is quickly becoming that attic in which everything gets stored but it would take forever to find what you’re looking for.
Snapchat however is one of several...