Author: Blancer

First KDDI’s iida INFOBAR, then Sharp’s clamshell Android phone HYBRID oo7SH, and now the so-called Smart Bar [JP]: Japan is getting more and more specially designed Android handsets. As you can see on the pictures, the Smart Bar adopts the “traditional” candy bar form factor but is actually powered by Android Gingerbread.

The device is manufactured by Huawei and will be distributed in Japan by mobile carrier eMobile. Targeted mainly at female users, the phones comes with a 3-inch WVGA touch display (LCD), 512MB RAM and ROM, a 5MP camera, a microSDHC slot, Bluetooth 2.1+EDR, IEEE802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi (tethering for up to 5 devices is possible), IrDA SIR infrared, GPS, and W-CDMA/GSM support. It’s just 51mm slim and weighs 114g.

eMobile plans to start rolling out the Smart Bar in Japan on September 22 (price: US$390).

Japanese chemicals company Teijin has developed a plastic that emits a blue light when exposed to radioactivity (pictured). Named SCINTIREX, the company expects the polyester-based resin to be used as a scintillator, a core part in radiation meters (radiation quantity can be calculated based on the level of luminescence).

Teijin developed the plastic in cooperation with Kyoto University and Japan’s National Institute of Radiological Science (NIRS) and plans to market it to makers of radiation detectors wanting to push their costs down.

According to Teijin, the production cost of scintillators could be reduced by over 90% if makers of these devices started using SCINTIREX. The material is not only said to offer better formability but also to be “superior to conventional scintillators in terms of luminescence, refractive index and density”.

SCINTIREX will be made available as early as this month.

You’ve got 500-something friends, all of about 50 you really interact with. You went to school with Lucy and Henry, you’ve worked with Mike for years, and Joe lives just down the block. Facebook knows all of this — it just doesn’t really go out of its way to show that it knows all of this. Until now.

Sometime recently, Facebook began rolling out “Smart Lists” to select users — which, as the name implies, intelligently groups certain obvious groups of friends into pre-packaged lists. Take that, Google Plus!

So far, it looks like Facebook is automatically grouping friends into three different bunches:

• People you work with
• People you attended school with
• People who live within 50 miles of you

If nothing else, that last one should be pretty handy for finding a few bar buddies on the quick without bugging your whole friends list (or, if we’re going for more practical stuff here, blasting out the cliche “Oh my God! Earthquake! Did anyone else feel that!” updates without sending it out to people who are on the other side of the world and obviously didn’t feel that.)

Following the launch of Google Plus and its absurdly easy-to-use grouping system, Facebook has taken a good amount of flack for their rather archaic list creation tools. Might this be the first of many improvements? The three pre-generated lists are nice, but when will I be able to be able to make my own smart lists, a la iTunes Smart Playlists? Yeah yeah, school friends, cool — when will I be able to auto-generate a list of all my friends who happen to share my love for John Leguizamo flicks? Screening partyyyyy!

[Thanks to @NickStarr for shooting the screenshot above our way]

In the days of yore, travel guides were written by intrepid travelers who spent months scribbling in diaries and field journals, or by teams of adventurous souls exhaustively scrap booking their travel experiences into the Lonely Planets of the world. Over the last decade, however, the Web has produced an untold number of personal travel blogs, digital photo albums, community-built travel guides like Tripadvisor and Wikitravel, and cool travel resources like Gogobot.

Today, Jon Tirsen and Douwe Osinga, two ex-Googlers, are officially unveiling their new mobile travel guide Triposo, which doesn’t want to just throw out the old model, it wants to do what Google did for the world’s information: Aggregate that sucka and make it easily searchable. Simply put, Triposo is based on the simple idea that travel guides can be designed in the same way that Google based its aggregation and search on some kick ass algorithms. And a little bit of indexing and semantic icing to boot.

To that end, travel guides like Triposo are possible today, because the content is there. Sites like Wikipedia, Wikitravel, and Openstreetmap have swaths of travel-related content, and Triposo wants to be the site that ranks that content so well you’ll never have to use another preachy, paper-based travel book. The environment will thank you.

Thus, the Triposo algorithm takes travel information from seven of the biggest open source aggregators (and several closed resources as well) and serves its users with content that’s relevant for them. Without any human interference, Triposo COO Richard Osinga tells me, the startup produces travel guides, with information on sightseeing, nightlife and restaurants, all ordered by Triposo’s algorithm — and complete with an easy-to-use (and offline-enabled) map. That very offline functionality in and of itself makes Triposo’s free mobile apps worth downloading.

Along with its web app, Triposo also offers 30 free destination guides for iOS using the same approach. The startup plans to release an iOS world guide, in which users can download a complete travel guide for any destination in the world, next month. Android users, on the other hand, can already find a world travel guide and guides for select cities here.

Triposo has been polishing its travel content algorithms for over a year now, and launched a swath of city guides for iOS and Android to test the algorithmic waters and user response. So far, people are using the guides on average of 20 minutes per session — so far, so good. But the end goal for Triposo is really to hone its all-in-one world travel guides, so that users can pick a destination anywhere across the globe and easily find the best cities and destinations to visit.

But how does Triposo choose these recommended destinations? “One of the things we also use intensively for our ranking algorithms are photographs”, said Co-founder Douwe Osinga. “We have a collection of a few million travel photos geotagged — with time stamps. How many pictures are taken at a place, at what time, on what day: That all helps us decide how important a location is”.

Of course, an algorithm-based company is only as good as its, well, algorithm. At the end of the day, travelers may prefer to receive personalized recommendations on destinations from their friends, or people they trust. (Or self-curated as one commenter pointed out.) And from this perspective, Triposo’s human-less recommendation platform may not suit everyone; but at the same time, it’s nice to have a free mobile app that works the same for everyone regardless. It may miss the mark for some, but the iPad app looks great, and so far, the algorithm hasn’t let me down. Amsterdam, here I come.

Along with platform unveiling, Triposo also told TechCrunch that it has raised $525,000 in seed financing from angel investors, including Chris Sacca, Taher Haveliwala, Google Wave Co-founder and Google Maps Lead Engineer Lars Rasmussen, and InterWest Partners.

The founders said that they will use this new infusion of capital to continue optimizing its algorithm, working towards the goal of becoming the best possible web and mobile destination to answer: Where should I go next? The question, however, for Triposo, is what their revenue model will be when the money runs out. Premium features? Paid apps? More to come.

For more on the interactive travel guides startup, check them out here. Let us know what you think. Travel content algorithms: Yay or nay?

Twitter CEO Dick Costolo confirmed its first $400 million tranche of a $800 million Series G this morning, saying that the company has just closed “more money than I’ve ever seen before” and therefore was in no hurry to IPO.

The entire series G, which involved Yuri Milner’s DST, institutional clients, T Rowe Price’s group of funds, Chris Sacca and others, was split into two parts, the first $400 million going directly to Twitter for preferred shares and the second $400 million used to buy out employees and existing shareholders. The financing values the company at ~$8 billion and  ~$16 a share.

Fortune’s Dan Primack reported earlier this morning that the second tranche of that funding is currently closing, and I’ve confirmed with multiple sources that the tender offer for Twitter employees ends tomorrow at 4 pm PST. No further documents will by accepted by the buyers after this time.

Twitter employees can currently only sell 20% of their shares before a liquidity event, and from what I am hearing many are not choosing to sell the full amount they are allowed to sell in this deal. Primack is reporting that existing investors Spark Capital and Union Square Ventures took this opportunity to sell existing shares but that later stage investors Benchmark Capital and Insight Venture Partners have thus far held on to theirs.

Funds will go out to those tendering shares on September 20th.

The huge variety of robots is a thing to marvel at. Just a few years ago, the best they could do was roll around or walk stiffly on poorly-hinged limbs. Now we have robots that gallop, slither, and fly like a bird. This mode of transportation is totally new to me, though. The Paraswift climbs up walls by generating a suction, then gets itself safely down by jumping off and deploying a little parachute. Why not, right?

Check out the video. The action happens about halfway in.

Paraswift is a collaboration between Disney Research and the Swiss Federal Research Institute. This demonstration took place during the International Conference on Climbing and Walking Robots, held at the University Pierre and Marie Curie in Paris.

It generates the suction by creating a vortex “like a mini tornado” in a central tube; the vortex has a low-pressure center, and this pressure gradient, through a process known as sorcery, causes the robot to stick to the wall. Only the wheels need to be in contact with the climbing surface, which makes it much more useful for climbing surfaces like stone and concrete, which can be difficult to form a vacuum seal around.

Once it’s had enough climbing, the little wings deploy, spreading the glider/parachute, and it jumps to relative safety. I say relative because it looks like there’s a bit of a bump at the end there. They’ll work that out in version 2.

Unfortunately, the first use I can think of for these things is setting them to climb up apartment buildings and assassinate the fleshy humans within. So this one gets filed under Robocalypse.

Over the past few months, my colleague MG Siegler has been piecing together the puzzle around Facebook’s Project Spartan, which is the social network’s secret plan to bring applications to the mobile web via HTML5. Today, we’ve learned that Facebook has made a key hire in the HTML5 space. We’ve confirmed that the social network has hired Teck Chia, who was the founder and CEO of OpenAppMkt.com, an app store for HTML5 mobile web apps.

Facebook didn’t actually acquire OpenAppMkt, but just hired Chia away. OpenAppMkt has been handed over to a new team and Chia’s no longer involved. For background, OpenAppMkt, which was incubated in Founders Den, launched as a centralized store for HTML5 mobile applications.

Before OpenAppMkt, Chia created and operated a number of Facebook apps with over 20 million users cumulatively. He also founded Gabbly, an instant chat/collaboration tool used by over 4 million users, and was an engineer at Oracle.

As MG has reported in the past, Project Spartan is the HTML5-driven mobile application platform that Facebook has been quietly building for months with the help of a group of third-party app developers. The thought by many is that Facebook is trying to break up the control Apple and Google have over the mobile app space, and Facebook is betting in HTML5. And we learned more about BoltJS, a UI framework that’s being built by Facebook for the purpose “helping developers build fantastic mobile web applications in HTML5 and Javascript.”

Clearly Chia brings significant expertise to Facebook in terms of possibly creating an app store for Facebook’s HTML5 platform. Of course, we can’t confirm that Chia is working on Project Spartan but it seems likely considering his background.

Notifo, a YC-backed company we once described as a “simple mobile notifications platform for anything”, is shuttering the windows and heading for the deadpool.

The idea was simple enough: Notifo would pipe real-time notifications from just about anywhere — be it Twitter, or Hacker News, or Github, or Facebook, or any Growl-compatible app on your computer — to your mobile device, long before most of these services had apps that could handle that duty themselves. Later down the road, Notifo doubled down their server’s functionality by tossing in free user-to-user chat.

Alas, the product just never managed to find a userbase.

In a world where just about every service has come to have an app of their very own, a service like Notifo has unfortunately become a bit redundant. Meanwhile, competing alternatives like Boxcar (on the app side) and Urban Airship (on the publisher/server side) have filled in any lingering gaps.

Notifo founder Chad Etzel says he’s already moved on to another job (Update: according to his personal blog, he’s now at Twilio. Congrats, Chad!), while co-founder Paul Stamatiou moved onto PicPlum (which we covered here) a while ago. Notifo will stay functional until the server money runs dry — but from this point on, there will be no further development effort.

Vodafone. It’s a brand that most folks here in the states would, at first pass, almost certainly chalk up as “that one European company that puts their name on a bunch of football soccer jerseys” — that is, if they recognized it at all.

And yet, Vodafone is essentially the biggest wireless carrier in the world. They’re the top carrier by revenues, and second to only China Mobile by subscribers. Oh, and they own 45% of Verizon. In other words, they’re kind of a big deal — and now they’re lookin’ to get in on some of that Silicon Valley action.

This evening, Vodafone is opening the doors to the Vodafone Xone (the sign store ran out of Z’s, so they just rolled with it.) Xone is a brand new research and development center in Redwood City which will serve as, amongst other things, a means of assessing potential investments for their Vodafone Ventures group.

But wait, there’s more! Vodafone’s new shop will also:

• Serve as an incubator with office space for up to 25 companies at a time
• Act as an event space, with Vodafone mentioning things like hackathons and conferences as options.
• Allow developers to test their products on Vodafone’s 2G/3G/LTE networks in a lab rather than.. you know, flying to Europe. They’ve actually built a backbone to connect back to Vodafone’s European network, so things should be as true-to-life as it gets (minus the tea, sausages, and any other British stereotypes I can’t think of at the moment.)

It’ll probably be a few weeks before Vodafone really settles in and starts diggin’ around for startups to usher in, but folks interested on getting their foot in the door early can find more info here. Do note, though, that (at least from my early conversations with them) it sounds like Vodafone is primarily interested in investing in companies with a product they’re ready to expand globally, rather than Angel/Early-seed stage startups.