Category: Tech news

Not a day goes by that I don’t see one of the Twitter users I follow Tweet a request for an item, such as last-minute tickets; or post about a newly available item, such as an apartment for rent. As Twitter has become the de-facto broadcast network, part of the content being shared revolves around buying and selling items via users’ social graph. @Shopr, which was developed at the TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon over the past 24 hours, is launching as a service that matches buyers and sellers on Twitter. It’s sort of like a Craigslist for Twitter.

Basically, @shopr uses Gnip to mine the Twitter firehose for people selling things and looking to buy items. The service’s founders tell me that in their initial research currently around 7,000 Tweets per hour relate to commerce and people looking to buy and sell items (over 5,000 selling-related Tweets are sent every hour).

Buyers can search on @shopr’s site, by specifying the item desired and their location. @shopr will match buyers with the appropriate Twitter users who have Tweeted about the item to sell. Buyers can also Tweet @ShoprBuy with what they want and where they want it and the service till Tweet back when they find the desired item. @shopr will also allow user to see pics of the item as well.

If you’re a seller and you Tweet about posting an item, @shopr will surface posts in their search engine so long as they make it clear what they’re selling and where they’re selling it. Sellers can also tweet @ShoprSell with what they’re selling, location and an asking price, and @shopr will match this with a request from a buyer.

And for an idea which was only born 24-hours ago, @shopr’s team has convinced a number of local retailers to participate in their selling service. A local San Francisco REI is listing several of their bikes, tents and backpacks (from the REI brand) with atShopr. San Francisco bookstore Dog Eared Books hast listed some of their inventory, Lost Weekend Video will be posting niche-genre movies and memorabilia, music store Aquarius Records are also putting some of their records on sale via the service.

@shopr says that currently the most desired items posted on Twitter included bikes, books, apartments, tickets. What makes the service unique is that it allows sellers and buyers to expand beyond your Twitter social graph—which could be very useful for both buyers and local merchants and brands.

Hundreds of hackers participated from late last night to early today morning at the fourth annual TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon in San Francisco, building in teams and waking up or popping enough coffee and Redbull this am in order to show off their hacks to judges including Salesforce’s VP of Open Cloud Standards Kevin Marks, Betfair’s Vice President of Mobile Engineering Raj Vemulapalli, Google’s Rohit Khare, MyBlogLog and OneTrueFan founder Eric Marcoullier, and Ask.com’s Director of Engineering, Mobile and Platforms Vishal Shah.

This year’s San Francisco Hackathon was our largest showing ever (over 700 hackers registered for the event), and what the hack teams came up with in the past 24 hours are about to be judged on stage with each team given 60 seconds to present. We’ll be looking for the next GroupMe, a startup conceived and built at New York’s Hackathon in 2010. GroupMe was just acquired by Skype a few weeks ago.

September 11 is our generation’s JFK assassination: everybody remembers where they were on that traumatic day. Whether you were nearby the attacks in New York City, Washington, and Pennsylvania or watching in horror from far away, it is a day that changed our country and many of our lives. Today will be filled with memorial services and constant TV coverage, but some of the most poignant remembrances are already happening on Twitter where people are sharing where they were and what they did.

Jeff Jarvis, who was near the World Trade Center that day, today is Tweeting out his vivid recollection of what it was like to be at Ground Zero (unfortunately, his Twitter account got rate-limited briefly because he was Tweeting so much, but now is restored). NPR’s Andy Carvin is gathering many of the Tweets and rebroadcasting them using the #OnSept11 hashtag (he is also collecting them into a Storify here).

Everyone has a memory about where they were and how the felt. I was living in San Francisco at the time, and woke up to the news. This was right after the first plane hit the World Trade Center and nobody knew what was going on. I turned on the TV and called my girlfriend in New York (who is now my wife). She was on Fifth Avenue watching the smoke billowing from one of the towers. Then the second plane hit, calls wouldn’t go through anymore, and the country came to a screeching halt. At least for a few days. Airplanes were grounded and nobody would go near a tall building anywhere. Where were you #OnSept11?

Photo credit: George Hackett/Getty

It’s been a solid 12 hours since the Disrupt Hackathon commenced, and things are getting a bit loopy. For the most part, this place is pretty quiet. We have a few sleepers in corners, and just about every cushy object in this building has been occupied. But the vast majority of hackers are wide awake, coding away.

And with good reason — $500,000 is at stake, among other awesome prizes.

Each table is littered with trash — Red Bull, Doritos, Snapple, and quite a bit of beer. The pizza has been absolutely demolished, and now Chinese food seems to be the main attraction. Unfortunately, a plate shortage led some to take matters into their own hands and rip up pizza boxes to use as make-shift plates.

Another development was the eruption of a massive bungee-dart war. According to the hackers “hundreds of darts were flying through the room.” In truth, I’m pretty sure there aren’t more than a few dozen darts in this building, but I bet it was epic nonetheless.

I’m getting ready to call it a night, but for these hackers this is just the beginning. Progress has been made, but many have also encountered a few hiccups along the way. The Ping Pong Hero app we mentioned earlier is having some Bluetooth issues, while Ryan Tsukamoto’s AR air drums have run into quite the obstacle — the iPad’s craptacular front-facing camera.

Still, determination seems to be the most dominant emotion in the room, and there’s no doubt in my mind that tomorrow will yield many success stories.

E-Book readers have really revolutionized the world. You can now fit a virtual library in your briefcase or purse. Let’s not forget that it has gotten most of us geeks to go outside from time to time to read thanks to their awesome e-ink displays.

One of the key differences between an e-book reader and a good old fashion dead tree book is that you require electricity to power the reader. We’ll since you’re heading outside to catch up on some reading why not kill two birds with one stone?

Instructables user Flapke shows us how a simple hack to his Kobo reader yields some solar juice for the battery. Although the how-to mainly focuses on the Kobo, the concept is universal; Make some room in the back panel for some small solar panels, solder in a few capacitors and an IC and you’ll be rocking an e-book reader that never needs to be changed via a cable (if you do venture outside or read right by a window that is).

[Link to Solar Charginig E-Reader]

Add A Solar Charger To Your E-Book Reader originally appeared on tech.nocr.at on 2011/09/09. Reproduction of content not allowed without consent.

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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.