Stories for May. 22, 2013
Twitter tool lets brands sign up customers inside a tweet
photo: GigaOM
Twitter’s latest ad product provides a call to action right inside a tweet — showing the company is finally creating marketing tools closer to the “bottom of the funnel.” Read more »
Retina overload: Mirasol smartphone display has 77% more pixels per inch than iPhone
photo: Image credit: Engadget
Apple started the race for smartphone screen clarity and others are following. Samsung, LG and HTC all beat out Apple’s Retina Display with higher pixel counts, but even they can’t compete against Qualcomm’s new Mirasol display. Read more »
Penguin agrees to $75 million class action settlement in ebook pricing lawsuit
photo: Shutterstock / zimmytws
Penguin has agreed to pay $75 million to settle the ebook pricing lawsuit with consumers and states. Meanwhile, Apple and the Department of Justice are set to go to trial on June 3. Read more at paidContent »
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Tesla could pay off the rest of the DOE loan today, says CEO
Electric car maker Tesla Motors could make history again, if it pays off its loan from the Department of Energy many years before its due. According to a tweet from the CEO that could be as early as today. Read more »
Splinter.me wants to replace your resume and offer career guidance
The data-centric Egyptian-Romanian-Belgian startup, which is in beta for now, has introduced new features to help recruiters and job-seekers find common connections across disparate networks and search using natural language. Read more »
OpenStack cloud builder Cloudscaling nets $10M from Juniper, Seagate and friends
New funding will help Cloudscaling continue to build out its Open Cloud System to suit a new class of enterprise applications that want to build on OpenStack. Read more »
Amazon’s new Kindle Worlds gives authors a way to sell fan fiction without legal hassles
Amazon Publishing is launching Kindle Worlds, a publishing platform that lets authors sell fan fiction based on properties like Gossip Girl. Amazon Publishing retains the rights to the works and will set the prices. Read more at paidContent »
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‘Personal cameraman’ Swivl gets $500k from Grishin Robotics to go big in education
Swivl, a motion-tracking, iPhone-compatible camera dock that enables individuals to easily video record themselves, has raised $500,000 from venture capital firm Grishin Robotics. Read more »
Who will be the last one at HTC left standing in the US?
After months of slowing smartphone sales and reduced profits, some HTC employees aren’t waiting for the company’s turnaround. Is it possible that HTC is planning to focus more on Asia over the U.S.? Read more »
PracticeFusion’s data footprint gets even bigger with health expense tools for consumers
photo: JCD
Electronic health records company PracticeFusion is making yet another move into the consumer healthcare space with new tools for helping patients manage and track health finances. Read more »
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Cloudcheckr boosts support for Amazon GovCloud
Amazon’s GovCloud presents its own special demands on users and service providers who work with it. CloudCheckr says it’s the only third-party AWS monitoring company that can help agencies assess their GovCloud workloads. Read more »
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GigaOM Chrome Show 6: Chrome battle plans shown off at Google I/O
photo: Image credit: Google Store
Chrome was up front and center at Google I/O, but most of the developments were in services and APIs. If you add them all together, you get a nice vision of how Google plans to dominate the computing world through Chrome. Read more »
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Truecaller API lets third parties tap into database of 600M phone numbers
The reverse-lookup service is now available to developers who can find a use for it, although users should rest assured that telemarketing operations won’t gain access to this treasure trove of numbers. Read more »
Cloudbase.io launches shared API to help mobile apps get connected
The London-based backend-as-a-service outfit thinks not enough mobile developers are considering the opportunities afforded by opening up their apps’ data to other apps, and it wants to help. Read more »
Top jobs of the week in digital media
photo: Shutterstock / Tom Mc Nemar
Looking for a job in digital media? Each week we highlight some of the most interesting positions posted to paidContent’s job board. Check out the latest gigs at media companies across the country. Read more at paidContent »
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Blue Coat to acquire Solera and sweeten network-security story as cyberattacks continue
photo: Blue Coat Systems
As cyberattacks just keep on coming, there’s lots of investment activity, and now Blue Coat Systems is adding more software and hardware capability by acquiring Solera Networks. Read more »
Stories for May. 21, 2013
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The devil you know: entrepreneurs prefer current ventures to new ones
photo: Thinkstock
Entrepreneurs are subject to many of the same biases that cause people to persist with their investments, and don’t necessarily behave to always maximize outcomes when presented with lucrative new opportunities, a new study says. Read more »
pC LIVE Podcast: How to monetize digital content: Advertising or paywall?
photo: Albert Chau
From paidContent LIVE 2013, a re-broadcast of our panel featuring MLB Advanced Media, News Corp., Atlantic Media and ProPublica discussing digital monetization strategies. Read more at paidContent »
Faster & faster! The US now has 82.4 million broadband connections
A resurgent housing market and stronger economy, along with our growing need for speed and connectivity is the reason why demand for US broadband is booming. Here are some numbers to give you an idea as to who is winning and who is losing. Read more »
Say those magic words: Xbox One, Google Glass and the rise of the always-on microphone
photo: visual.dichotomy
Microsoft’s new Xbox One is listening to every word uttered in your living room. But it’s only interested in very few of them . Read more »
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Boost Mobile applies a unique spin on the mobile wallet
photo: Boost Mobile
The Sprint prepaid brand is testing out a financial services app that allows you to pay bills, transfer funds and cash checks within a mobile app. For physical transactions, Boost is supplying a prepaid Visa card. Read more »
Top jobs of the week in tech
photo: Shutterstock / Tom Mc Nemar
Looking for a job in tech? Each week we highlight some of the most interesting positions posted to GigaOM’s job board. Check out the latest tech gigs at leading companies across the country. Read more »
Integrated Vimeo, Flickr sharing could follow Twitter, Facebook to iOS
A report on Tuesday from 9to5Mac says Apple is looking to bolster social sharing options in iOS 7 by integrating Vimeo and Flickr. The inclusion could be a subtle way to boost one of its biggest competitor’s rivals. Read more »
Yahoo swears it isn’t going to screw up Tumblr — but how realistic is that promise?
photo: Flickr / Stephen Brace
Fans of Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer say she shouldn’t be blamed for the company’s history of failed acquisitions — but there are plenty of other reasons to be skeptical about Yahoo’s $1.1-billion Tumblr deal. Read more »
From Cronkite to Couric: Internet Archive gets $1 million to expand TV news collection
photo: ollyy
The Internet Archive recently launched an ambitious project to collect and index all broadcasts since the start of television. This week it got a major boost. Read more at paidContent »
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Amprius has built a lithium ion battery that can last 25% longer than today’s batteries
Venture capital-backed lithium ion battery startup Amprius is finally moving into commercial production, with an announcement that it has OEM partners in place, and will start making its second-gen batteries later this year. Read more »
Your tax dollars at work: Apple’s Cook navigates the senatorial theater of the absurd
The reason for Apple’s being singled out for common U.S. tax minimization practices wasn’t completely explained by a U.S. Senate subcommittee Tuesday. But Tim Cook handled the grilling before Congress easily. Read more »
VMware lays out prices for hybrid cloud offering — now customers have the ball
photo: Jordan Novet
VMware executives shared the prices that its customers will pay to use its new vCloud Hybrid Service launching later this year, but it’s unclear if customers and partners will be happy with the offering. Read more »
Sprint ups its bid for Clearwire at the eleventh hour
Sprint has given into shareholder pressure and raised its bid for Clearwire by 14 percent. Clearwire immediately canceled today shareholder vote, rescheduling for next week. Read more »
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Microsoft reveals new Xbox One with live TV guide, media apps and group video Skype
Microsoft announced an new Xbox called Xbox One Tuesday that comes with support for live TV, group video calls via Skype and multi-tasking for entertainment apps. Read more »
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Leaked benchmarks suggest Intel could power Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 3 10.1
Intel could get its largest mobile design win yet: Two different benchmark sites indicate that at the very least, Samsung is testing an Intel Atom chip inside the upcoming Galaxy Tab 3 Read more »
Report: one in four online teens now use Twitter
What are teenagers up to on social media? Twitter use has grown dramatically since 2011, while Facebook stays dominant but shows flat growth. Read more »
Considerations for rolling out an NoSQL strategy in the enterprise
What are the likely trends in NoSQL, and what’s driving NoSQL adoption in the enterprise? Get answers to these questions and more when you join GigaOM Research and 10gen for an in-depth discussion on June 4 at 10 a.m. PT. Read more »
Nvidia’s new Tegra superchip boasts 150 Mbps speeds, but it’s not LTE-Advanced
photo: Nvidia
Despite being late to the market, Nvidia is showing it can keep up with the latest technological advances in LTE technology. But like it’s exaggeration-prone competitors, Nvidia is falsely labeling its chip “LTE-Advanced.” Read more »
Brrr: The chilly conditions that quantum computers need to run
Quantum computers, which have recently been bought by Google and Lockheed Martin, aren’t just sophisticated computers, they need to operate at near absolute zero temperatures to deliver their quantum effects, and that’s a tricky problem. Read more »
Brow.si wants to make mobile websites behave like native apps
The platform could give publishers a new tool in their quest to monetize online content. Not only does it let mobile websites issue push notifications, but it also introduces new real estate for ads. Read more »
Powermat marries PowerKiss, vows to use same wireless charging standard
By the wireless power invested in me, I now pronounce you a couple. Two wireless charging companies combine and agree on a single power standard. That’s great but there’s still much work to be done in this industry. Read more »
The future of propaganda: A Q&A with Sean Gourley about big data and the “war of ideas”
photo: Getty Images
During the Iraq war, the U.S. military used open-source data, from news reports to Facebook photos, to help detect patterns in the violence. But that’s just the beginning. In future conflicts, big data will be a key part of the propaganda campaigns around the wars. Read more »
Six finalists in the book discovery Publishing Hackathon; winner to be announced at BEA
The six finalists of the Publishing Hackathon held over the weekend in New York focus on discovering books in new ways — whether it’s by browsing book jackets or getting recommendations based on your web browser history. Read more at paidContent »
Why one startup thinks laying a few bets could help companies convince employees to slim down
photo: Michelangelus
A new startup is using financial incentives and penalties to help employers encourage their employees to lose weight and lower their risk for chronic disease. Read more »
