Category: Tech news

Y Combinator-backed Vidyard, a ‘YouTube for businesses’, has raised $1.65 million from Softech VC, Jawed Karim (Co-Founder of YouTube), Y Combinator, SV Angel, Andreessen Horowitz, iNovia Capital, Paul Buchheit, Vivi Nevo, Dennis Kavelman, David Nizkad and others.

Vidyard, which launched in August, solves a pain point for businesses who want to use YouTube videos as a marketing tool. Many businesses embed YouTube videos on their sites, but visitors can click through the video to YouTube and off the brand’s site — and those videos also include YouTube’s ads and branding. Ooyala and Brightcove both offer professional, enterprise-hosted video platforms but these can be expensive.

Vidyard solves this problem by offering a service that’s very similar to YouTube, but without that link to a third-party portal. The startup also offers instant, detailed and real-time analytics with regards to the embedded video performance. The Vidyard platform provides professional, ad free video hosting, along with real-time analytics, branded video players, instant start technology, fully customizable calls to action, and seamless syndication to YouTube, Facebook and Twitter.

Here’s how Vidyard works. First, you can choose to upload a video file or a video from YouTube. You can then add a custom thumbnail, choose from 10 different player skins, customize the size and color, enable viral sharing on Twitter and Facebook, and default content to HD if you’d like.

In terms of integrating the video into a site, Vidyard offers a simple code that can be embedded on any site (users can choose to have an in-line video or one that appears as a pop-up). Or businesses can choose to send people to a landing page with a link to the video. Users can also comment on these pages via Twitter and Facebook.

Once a business uses Vidyard, it can also access detailed analytics on the performance of the video. The startup allows businesses to see how many people watched a video, their attention span, minutes watched, most popular times within a video, where people are located geographically, and more.

Currently, businesses are using Vidyard to manage the success of their content and target their most engaged users. Consumer brands use it to automatically push video content to their social feeds and analyze the success of each “channel”.

Vidyard, which employs a freemium model, is also launching a number of new features to its platform today as well. The service now redirects a video to a specific URL  automatically upon completion of playback, and allows marketers to create a Call to Action “Pop Out”, that creates a form (to capture leads or advertise) that slides out of the video at any point during playback.

Starting today, Vidyard also has the capability to push video content to a YouTube channel, Facebook wall and Twitter feed, as well as report on the performance of your YouTube channel directly by pulling YouTube’s analytics into the Vidyard Dashboard. And Vidyard will manage Video Search Engine Optimization by automatically generating an optimized sitemap.

Part of Vidyard’s secret sauce is the technology behind the platform. The startup uses RTMP streaming, which means you can jump to the middle of a video without waiting for the buffer to catch up. You can also implement chaptering, which means you can overlay links to additional videos on top of the one being watched. Every plan includes 101 GB of bandwidth and Vidyard tweaks its hosting technology to be bandwidth efficient, and only buffers ten second in advance so the business isn’t wasting bandwidth on clients that aren’t watching the whole videos.

It is certainly ambitious for Vidyard to take on video giant YouTube, but the startup does highlight a number of pain points and problems for businesses using YouTube as a marketing and communications platform. With its low price points, and comprehensive features, Vidyard could gain a loyal following among small and large businesses.

Don’t you sometimes wish you could just rip the display off your MacBook and use it as an iPad? OK, maybe that’s a bit violent, but it’s still worth dreaming of. The folks over at Apple apparently agree with me, as Cupertino has just been granted an application by the U.S. Patent and Trademarks Association for a “Clutch barrel antenna for wireless electronic devices.”

Obviously, the title doesn’t necessarily imply “transformable iPad/MacBook hybrid,” but just hold your horses for a second as we parse through this patent speak.

So the whole “clutch barrel” bit has to do with a way in which you can connect the two devices and install antennas into the contraption. The display will be able to rotate as well as be completely detached if, let’s say, you want to do a little leisurely reading.

The idea of combining a tablet and a computer seems to be the direction Apple is headed. If you think about OS X Lion a bit, it’s obvious that iOS was in mind during development, if not a concrete source to draw from.

Not everyone necessarily loved the new platform, but it is clear that Apple is considering touch just as heavily as it is the keyboard, if not more. That said, Apple has filed a number of patents that are related to this same iPad/MacBook hybrid, so it wouldn’t be all that surprising to see this concept come to life over the next couple years.

[via Patently Apple]

Amazon just entered the tablet market this week with its Kindle Fire. But this time next year, it could be introducing its own smartphone. A research report put out this morning by Citi analysts Mark Mahaney and Kevin Chang states that an “Amazon smartphone may be coming next year.”

Based on supply-chain checks with hardware manufacturers in China, Citi believes that Amazon is jointly developing the smartphone with Foxconn, but that the phone itself will be manufactured by TMS (which produces the Kindle line).

The chips that will power the phone are at this point believed to be a Texas Instruments OMAP 4 processor and a Qualcomm “dual mode 6-series standalone baseband” (HSPA+ / CDMA EVDO).

Given the estimated hardware costs of $150 to $170, this will turn out to be a mid-end smartphone which could retail for $300 or less. But Amazon is likely to subsidize much of the costs to make it even more competitive just as it did with the $200 Kindle Fire. “What is important to note is that Amazon does not need to make money on hardware,” writes Mahaney and Chang.

Amazon views mobile devices as the front-end for its digital media. It is a delivery mechanism for ongoing subscription services, so it doesn’t care about making money on the hardware. It is betting it will make much more money on digital books, movies, games, and ecommerce over time.

It’s Demo Day for Gazelle Lab, the new Tampa Bay-based TechStars Network member, which is seeing its first class of startups launch this morning in downtown St. Petersburg, Florida. The accelerator, based on the successful TechStars model, was founded in early 2011 with three goals: build an entrepreneurship community in the Tampa Bay area, create a seed stage pipeline (something notoriously lacking in Florida today) and create more jobs.

Despite its struggle to register as a tech hotspot, there’s actually a fairly sizable tech community in the Tampa Bay region – it just doesn’t always involve early stage startups like the ones you would see featured on sites like TechCrunch. Developers here often seem content to work at larger firms, like in banking, healthcare, and of course, given MacDill’s presence, for the military.

With Gazelle Lab, that may soon start to change.

The Lab was founded by Brent Britton, Bill Jackson, John Morrow, Marvin Scaff and Daniel James Scott, all of whom bring considerable knowledge and experience to the startups who participate in this 3-month program. Britton has been helping companies for more than 20 years in Boston, San Francisco and the Silicon Valley, New York, and Florida. Bill Jackson is a Professor of Entrepreneurship and Innovation and the Director of the Sustainable Entrepreneurship & Innovation Alliance at USF St. Petersburg’s College of Business. John Morrow is the Entrepreneur-In-Residence with the Sustainable Entrepreneurship & Innovation Alliance at USF. The experienced software entrepreneur and technology innovator Marvin Scaff and entrepreneur and author Daniel James Scott round out the group.

Ideally, the startups that launch here will remain here, bringing much-needed jobs to the Tampa Bay area. That may prove to be a challenge – after all, as many VC’s will still tell you that your startup’s location still matters. A lot. But in reality, kick-ass companies can be built anywhere, so it may as well be Tampa Bay. Tampa Bay: where the housing is affordable, the white sand beaches can be enjoyed year-round and where others’ tourist attractions are just our weekend activities. (Yes, Tampa resident here. I like it, too).

Tampa Bay has another benefit which Gazelle Lab happily taps into: the University of South Florida. The accelerator is a part of the Sustainable Entrepreneurship & Innovation Alliance at USF St. Petersburg’s College of Business, which means it’s in a unique position to leverage the expertise of the student and faculty’s expertise. As a part of the Gazelle Lab program, the startups are asked tough questions by USF entrepreneurship majors who help the companies with their due diligence.

And, as a TechStars Network member, Gazelle Lab has access to other TechStar resources, including mentorship and hosting deals and discounts. It also offers the usual benefits of an incubator, like free office space, local mentors, legal assistance and, of course, seed stage funding. Each of the companies gets up to $18,000 ($6,000 per founder) in exchange for Gazelle’s 6% stake. The group is now looking to raise a $3 million dollar fund which will keep the program going for another five years.

Based on this first round of startups (below), that investment may be worth it.

And now, the new launches:

AutoIQ.co is built around solving very common points of pain for drivers like, “what does my check engine light mean?” and “who do I trust to get it fixed?” The service combines automotive diagnostics, mobile technologies and data analytics to create a “health record” for cars. Drivers use an easy-to-install hardware device ($29.99) to get access to engine diagnostics while an accompanying mobile app provides additional service record scanning, plus trusted referrals from your social networks and AutoIQ’s network. Consumers dump their service record receipts in a pre-paid envelope, which AutoIQ digitizes and inputs in the app. The apps and service record scanning are free, but when a provider match is found, they pay a modest messaging fee to contact the consumer in need. Started in August, AutoIQ’s Android app and service are in private testing now. More mobile platforms and broader beta testing is scheduled later this fall. Although there are many competitors (CarMD, AuotMD, etc.), AutoIQ sees them as potential partners for programmatic access to the historical car “health” data it collects from customers.

Dropost.it wants to change the way you share gifts by allowing users to drop gifts for friends at a given location. These gifts are somewhat like virtual gift cards that show up when you visit a particular venue. The service uses the geolocation capabilities in modern smartphones to know when you’ve arrived, and will then ping you about the money your friend left for you. For example, you show up for dinner at a favorite restaurant and get a message that says, “happy anniversary, this meal is on us…love mom and dad.” This message can be written out or recorded as a video. The service works on top of PayPal for now, but plans for mobile wallet integration are on the company’s roadmap. The potentially interesting part to Dropost.it’s offering is how it recommends which gifts you should buy. The service accesses social networking data from Facebook and soon, Foursquare and Twitter, to make suggestions as to the venues and merchants your friends favorite.

Kngroo wants to help you discover your city by way of an urban scavenger hunt application that uses game mechanics. Players receive trophies and gold, redeemable for deals and gifts, for their interactions with locally owned and operated businesses. In addition to being a fun game, Kngroo is also a powerful marketing platform for local businesses. Merchants can sign up for a premium account to access the demographic data Kngroo collects on their customers and can customize the experience of their location using the company’s “Tools For Engagement.” While not entirely novel, the new app presents an interesting mix of local discovery (e.g., Foursquare Radar, Gowalla) with check-in deals and scavenger hunts (SCVNGR, Shopkick, etc.).

Teburu is a complete online platform for small-to-medium sized restaurants that allows them to better serve and connect with their online and mobile customers. Customers can order from any of the restaurants’ locations over the Web or from their smartphone, as well as place reservations, receive coupons and newsletters and more. Restaurants using the service can then increase revenues (in testing, Teburu saw increases of 25%) by making pickup and delivery orders easier and more accurate. All this is run through inexpensive Android-based tablets or through the restaurants’ existing POS, if the restaurant desires. The tablet can either print out a ticket or can be used alongside the POS system for manual entry. The system is currently in a closed, live beta with five chains and is raising capital for expansion and scale. Although other solutions exist for facilitating the online/mobile ordering process, they are typically expensive or are managed by third-parties who handle orders by sending them to the restaurant’s fax or email.

Red Hawk Interactive Inc. has created an e-commerce, white-label platform that allows content creators (home fitness, education, college sports, independent Web series, kids content and more) who normally distribute content over DVD to make it available through streaming media platforms via a subscription service. Content creators can upload their video to one platform (Red Hawk) for distribution to other devices like Boxee, Roku and Apple TV. By creating these micro-channels, Red Hawk Interactive Inc., wants to enable companies to monetize their content while also giving consumers instant access to the content across a wide array of mobile, tablet and other devices. The company is currently working with sports training video producers and creators of other unique content to secure distribution rights.

PropertyManagementdirect.com is a new service offered by Leads Direct Inc, a pay-for-performance Internet lead provider for niche service-based verticals. PropertyManagementDirect.com connects property owners with property managers in a new way, simplifying the entire process. Property owners use the site to learn about property management, learn how to hire a property manager, interact with other property owners, get advice and find the right property management company for their needs. Property management companies receive high quality leads and only pay for the leads they receive. PropertyManagementDirect.com will launch December 1st 2011, with a soft launch November 15th. The formula will then be replicated across other verticals.

The wait for the Galaxy Nexus is finally over in some parts of the world, but those of us in the States are still waiting for our turn with our noses pressed up against the glass. As if to torture us further, Google has not only released the domestic variant’s full spec sheet, but they have also uploaded a full series of Galaxy Nexus walkthrough videos.

As far as the spec sheet goes, there isn’t too much that we didn’t already know. It does however confirm that the US-spec Galaxy Nexus has a slightly beefier battery than its international counterpart (1850mAh vs. 1750mAh). That extra juice comes at a price, and in this case it means Verizon’s Nexus is just a little chubbier than the one teased in Hong Kong. Luckily, the difference is a just over half a millimeter so only wearers of the tightest skinny jeans have cause to complain.

So, with that spec sheet out in the wild, we know almost everything about the Galaxy Nexus except for its actual release date. In the meantime, feel free to make the wait even more excruciating by watching Google’s walkthrough videos. There are quite a few out there, with topics ranging from “using Beam” to “how not to break the battery plate.”

Interestingly, some of Droid-Life’s readers point out that Verizon’s Backup Assistant and My Verizon Mobile apps seem to be preloaded on the device. It’s frankly a bit of a shock considering the Nexus’s status as a pure Google phone, but I’m guessing that little bit of promotion had Verizon putting their corporate checkbook through the wringer.

Lastly, Google’s thrown up what seems to be a new commercial for the Galaxy Nexus, entitled “Calling All.” Rather than dissecting the ad and debating its merits and shortcomings, I’ll just leave it here for you to peek at. Personally, I think it’s a welcome change from the overbearing pomposity of Motorola’s recent Droid RAZR ads, but we’ll soon see if the softer approach works out.

After raising a whopping $81 million in funding from a group of all-star investors, including Salesforce, SAP Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners, NEA, Andreessen Horowitz and Draper Fisher Jurvetson; cloud storage platform Box.net is setting its sights on the next stage—supporting its developer community. The company is launching the a new platform for developer building off of the Box platform, called the Box Innovation Network (/bin). Additionally, Box is unveiling a $2 million fund (of its own money) to invest in enterprise applications built on the Box platform.

Box, which has 8 million users and stores over 300 million documents, is a cloud storage platform for the enterprise that comes with collaboration, social and mobile functionality. Box has evolved into more than just a file storage platform, and has become a full-fledged collaborative application where businesses can actually communicate about document updates, sync files remotely, and even add features from Salesforce, Google Apps, NetSuite, Yammer and others.

Currently, company provides storage solutions for 77% of the Fortune 500 with 100,000 businesses using Box’s service (250,000 new users are joining each month).

Of course, a central part of this growth, says CEO and co-founder Aaron Levie has been the company’s developer community and ecosystem. Currently, Box has 4,500 API partners and is seeing 200 million API calls per month. In fact, there are four times the number of developers creating applications currently from a year ago, says Levie. Specifically, mobile has seen massive growth with a 30 times increase in the volume of mobile enterprise deployments at the close of Q3 2011 compared to the close of Q3 2010.

The company has seen a number of successful API deployments this year at a large-scale at a number of businesses, including Pabst Brewing Company, DOW Chemical, and National Equity Fund.

A big part of Box’s next step as a more mature company is bringing developers together into the Box community and help API developers create better applications. “Slow-moving enterprise software giants have produced very little innovation in recent years, and their closed ecosystems have made it all but impossible for outside players to create compelling experiences for customers on legacy systems,” Levie says.

The launch of /bin creates a community that supports developers as they work to build enterprise-grade apps off of Box’s platform that will meet business demands and help transform cloud storage.

At its core, /bin is structured around its direct partner and member connections. Box is partnering with Appcelerator, VMWare’s Cloud Foundry, Heroku, Rackspace, SnapLogic, and Twilio to offer special services relating to hosting, mobile and more to developers building off the Box platform. The vision for these partners, says Levie, is that they will provide /bin members with the tools and services they will need to build robust applications using the Box APIs.

/bin will also offer resources, new features and functionality on the Box platform. In addition to working with platform partners, Box is also investing up to two million dollars in fund money for /bin members chosen to support the growth and development of future enterprise applications built on the Box platform. The funding will go towards equity investments, intellectual property acquisitions, and co-development of enterprise products.

As Levie tells me, “the general idea behind /bin and the investment fund is to cultivate a strong community and network for developers to get right resources and support to build enterprise applications.”

2011 has proven to be a big year for Box. Prior to announcing the major raise a few weeks ago, Box was a $500 million acquisition target (in the last funding round, Box was valued at $600 million). And the company has debuted a number of new product innovations including debuting integrations with Salesforce’s social network for the enterprise Chatter, and a new syncing feature.

As for what’s next, Levie tells us that we can expect a major product update in Box’s enterprise edition for businesses soon. We’ll also see a number of exciting partnerships in mobility space and future product development in mobile. Box is also using its new funding towards international expansion and will be opening a third data center in 2012.

Of course, part of Box’s future could include a public offering. One of the company’s first investors, DFJ’s managing director Josh Stein told us recently that “Box absolutely should be a public company” and said that an offering is in the company’s future plans.

As for how that fits in to today’s news, creating a vibrant developer ecosystem is an important port of Box’s maturation from a startup to a billion dollar (and potentially public) company. And engaging developers will certainly help Box continue to grow the reach of its cloud storage platform.

Facebook Pages can host as many applications as they want, but unfortunately, most visitors never click away from the single default landing tab. To let its brand and band clients offer ecommerce, crowdfunding, music, video, and ticketing all within their default tab, marketing platform FanBridge today launches partnerships with 12 developers. Clients can simultaneously integrate functionality from Topspin, IndieGoGo, SoundCloud, Stickam, and Songkick, and other partners into the free FanBridge Fan Page Creator app. By creating a partner ecosystem, FanBridge can become the hub which aggregates other apps rather than having to build them on its own. The omni-app’s flexibility and name-brand partners could help FanBridge pull clients away from Facebook Page management titans such as Buddy Media and Vitrue that force brands to choose a single feature app as their default landing tab.

At its core, FanBridge Fan Page Creator is about reducing friction inherent in the Facebook Page tab application system. Page visitors land at one app, but have to use the small navigation menu on the side of the screen to visit others. They rarely go to the trouble, so brands are typically left to either define their identity with one app that doesn’t tell the whole story, or go to the trouble of frequently rotating the default app. Fanzila tried to solve this through a creating multi-feature app, but it’s building all the modules on its own rather than picking the best providers of commonly requested  functionality.

FanBridge presents an easier cross-app experience for users that could translate into more engagement, conversions, donations, and more actions that benefit brands. FanBridge’s VP of Product AJ Magnuson explains that its partners have all developed high quality standalone apps, but that “some have had trouble gaining traction or just want to focus on core functionality” rather than building out other features or a full content management system. Integrations with FanBridge give them added distribution without much additional development work.

Clients of FanBridge can add their content and determine which partner functionality to show through a CMS dashboard. Soon, FanBridge will be aggregating data about partner feature usage from across the Pages it powers to give clients recommendations about which functionality will work best for them. It hopes to pull in clients with the free app, then upsell them on subscriptions to its social marketing suite and other services.

Facebook has classically done a poor job with app discovery, for both users and Page admins. Through its ecosystem FanBridge can act as a curator, giving brands access to only the highest quality apps, and relieving them from having to choose whether visitors will first see their ecommerce storefront, video channel or another app.

I’ve listed the 12 partners and their functionalities below, and developers can now apply to join the FanBridge ecosystem.

• Bandsintown – Concert promotion, Facebook Events integration, and ticket sales
• Crowdsurge – Merchandise, music, and ticket sales
• Dympol – Charity donation solicitation
• IndieGoGo – Crowdfunding
• Moontoast – Ecommerce with exclusive offers for fans
• Nimbit – Music and merchandise ecommerce
• Owjo – Digital media and physical merchandise ecommerce
• PledgeMusic – Real-time fund raising and charity donation solicitation
• Songkick – Concert promotion, ticket sales
• SoundCloud – Music streaming
• Stickam – Live video streaming
• Topspin – Marketing and ecommerce suite

Multi-device social gaming platform Sibblingz is debuting a new version of its game creation platform Spaceport.

For background, Spaceport, allows game developers to build a game once, using Javascript, and have it play across all smartphone operating systems, with a native app-like experience and fast performance. The web-based games run as a hybrid HTML5 – native app, and the code for the game is written once, in a simple scripting language, so that they can then run on any device. And developers can also create native iOS apps as well using Spaceport.

Because Adobe announced that it would ve ceasing further development of its mobile Flash plug-in, Sibbling wants to fill the gap for Flash game developers.
The company says Spaceport 3.0 is the most advanced iteration of Sibblingz’s mobile game development and rendering platform yet.

Spaceport 3.0 allows developers to continue writing games with Adobe’s Flash desktop-based authoring and content creation tools while making the games instantly usable on iOS, Android and HTML5. The platform automatically converts Flash animations created in Adobe tools as “SWF” files into Spaceport vector graphics. These are then rendered on iOS and Android devices by the high performance GPU-based rendering engine in Spaceport as opposed to the much slower and battery-hogging Flash plug-in which utilizes the CPU.

As Siblingz’ Peter Relan explains: Flash developers are very good at understanding how to build Flash games using Adobe tools and scripting languages like ActionScript. In moving to mobile they have to abandon these tools, languages and APIs and learn new tools, APIs and hard core languages like Objective C and Java which they have no clue about. Spaceport allows them to develop their games in a scripting language (Javascript, using APIs that are very similar Adobe’s Flash APIs) and the exact same Adobe toolset…With Spaceport they get the best of both worlds: the comfort of Adobe tools and API’s, AND being able to deploy on all mobile devices.

Spaceport 3.0 uses JavaScript instead of ActionScript to support high performance HTML5 games on Android and iOS, and has improved performance overall. The platform is free for developers.

Sibblingz, which is profitable, already makes ‘millions of dollars a year’ in revenue from share fees from games using its technology. The company just raised $1 million in new funding from YouWeb.

Fond as we are of Microsoft’s touchscreen Surface table and all of the kooky things people have made it do, its replacement has come one step closer to seeing the light of day. Samsung and Microsoft have just announced that the next-generation Surface table, the SUR40, is now available for preorder in over 23 countries.

One of the first things you notice about the SUR40 is how much slimmer it is than the Microsoft’s original Surface. Gone is the massive pedestal that housed the Surface’s internals — the SUR40 manages to squeeze an Athlon X2 processor and the rest of its components flush against the 40-inch multi-touch display.

Samsung was able to trim so much cruft from the Surface’s body because the inclusion of Microsoft’s PixelSense technology allowed them to axe the 5-camera array that powered the original. PixelSense allows the SUR40′s LCD panel to essentially “see” objects, movements, and touch gestures — check the video below to see it in action. On top of that, the SUR40 is also capable of tracking up to 50 touch points simultaneously, which sounds like a good time in my book.

Businesses found the original Surface a novel way to have their customers interact with rich content, leading to early partnerships with companies like Harrah’s, T-Mobile, and Starwood Hotels. Samsung and Microsoft seem to be targetting new models to the same sort of audience, but there’s nothing that says you can’t for your own little commercial enterprise.

If the thought of living without one of these things in your life is just too much to bear, you can reserve one for around $8,400. Samsung and Microsoft still haven’t pinned down a release date though, so just be careful — you may be waiting left waiting for a little while yet.

Angie’s List, which offers consumers a way to review and rate doctors, contractors and service companies on the Web, priced its IPO at the high end of the range, at $13 per share last night, and today is starting to trade on the Nasdaq under the symbol “ANGI.” This morning Angie’s List opened at $18 per share, a nearly 40 percent increase from its pricing last night.

At $18 per share, Angie’s List would be valued at a nearly $900 million market cap. Angie’s List raised $114 million in the offering.

Angie’s List launched in 1995 with a focus on local home, yard and car services, sits at the intersection of local search, user-generated content and subscription-based services. To date, Angie’s List has raised nearly $100 million from Battery Ventures, T. Rowe Price, City Investment Group, Cardinal Ventures and others.

As of September 30, 2011, the company offered its service to paying members in 175 local markets in the United States (compared to 170 as of August). Angie’s List now has more than 1 million (up from 820,000) paid memberships.

Angie’s List incurred marketing expenses of $30.2 million and $48 million in 2010 and the nine months ended September 30, 2011, respectively. In 2010 and the nine months ended September 30, 2011, the company’s revenue was $59.0 million and $62.6 million, respectively. In the same periods, Angie’s net loss was $27.2 million and $43.2 million. Angie’s List has incurred net losses its start and had an accumulated deficit of $160.6 million as of September 30, 2011.

The nation’s long nightmare is almost over. 50 Cent’s headphones are finally fully detailed and SMS Audio is taking pre-orders for the over-the-ear models. The in-ears will be available later. Thank goodness. This was turning into the NeverEnding Story Part IV.

The story goes that 50 Cent & Co. enlisted the help of Sleek Audio to build a wireless headset presumable to compete with Beats. The resulting product was the star of Sleek Audio’s CES 2011 booth but the deal went south last May. Then, over the summer, 50 Cent’s SMS Audio acquired KonoAudio for its executive leadership and likely manufacturing know-how. So here we are today. The entire line is finally revealed after several weeks of teaser pics.

The prices are right in line with current market trends. The wireless over-the-ear cans cost $399 while the wired versions cost just $299. Both are availble for pre-order starting today with an expected ship date of December 5th. The earbuds start at $129 but aren’t available for order just yet. Look for a hands-on post in the coming weeks.