Category: Tech news

A village in India has decided to rename itself and henceforth be known as Snapdeal.com Nagar (which means town). Snapdeal.com being an online couponing company that recently raised $12 million and has the lead over Groupon in India in the local ecommerce space.

So what gives? This isn’t exactly the first time anything like this has happened (mostly for cheap publicity scoring reasons), but the story behind it I think is unique and worth sharing.

Snapdeal has adopted a remote village in India and enabled clean drinking water facilities for its people by installing manual pumps. To show their gratitude, the village’s residents have decided to rename their village to Snapdeal.com Nagar, actually taking the company by surprise.

Snapdeal.com CEO Kunal Bahl tells me the goal has always been to build a socially responsible organization, and that the decision to provide clean drinking water for the village came from a conversation with one of its 500 employees in the hallways.

This person mentioned that his family lives near a cluster of villages where the locals have to walk over a kilometer every day and stand in line just for clean water, so Bahl figured they should explore if they couldn’t easily and cost-effectively solve their problem.

Bahl is refreshingly modest about what happened next, too:

We honestly did something very simple – didn’t even cost that much – and installed 15 hand pumps, which now enable clean water within a distance of 50 meters for all the residents of the village.

We must have spent a total of $5000 on getting this and the really cool part about this is that these 15 hand pumps will give clean water to the villagers for the next 15-20 years!

The decision to rename their village Snapdeal.com Nagar, Bahl says, was not only a gesture of appreciation from the residents but also a sort of demonstration against the local governance and administration, for their lack of care and competence.

Bahl also explained that they’ll be doing a lot more over the next few years for the community in this village, such as upgrading facilities in the local school and hospital.

In another testament of his humility, Bahl concludes:

Ours is a fast growing, yet relatively still-to-get-there company with 500 people.

There are 640,000 companies incorporated in India, many many of them much much larger than ours. Assuming even 10% have the resources to do anything (and $5000 isn’t really a lot), we can solve water problems for 64,000 villages and millions of people in India. Something to think about.

By now, most everyone in your circle of friends has played with a Kindle and an iPad. Fewer have picked up a Nook. But I’d urge you to give this dark horse a shot.

I’ve been testing the newest black and white version of Barnes & Noble’s e-reader, and, well, you can color me impressed.

The freshly-updated Nook is smaller and lighter than Amazon’s Kindle, and on those qualities alone it stands a excellent chance of capturing some more market share in the e-ink device game. But the new Nook also embraces social media sharing (and does it well enough), eliminates all buttons save a “Home” key (where’d they get that idea?) and ambidextrous page-turners, and introduces a responsive e-ink touchscreen that controls an intuitive interface.

The Wi-Fi versions of both Amazon’s and Barnes & Noble’s similar-sized black and white e-readers are priced at $140, though Amazon does sell a cheaper, ad-supported Kindle for $114.

As much as the new Nook implores you to choose it over the Kindle, Amazon’s device isn’t its real adversary. Both devices share a common enemy: the tablet. iPads and Honeycombs and other touchscreen devices that can be used not only to read books, but watch videos, browse the web, mow your lawn and whatever else.

As my Wired colleague Brian X. Chen writes in his new book, Always On, “Soon, manufacturers will no longer be able to sell single-function gadgets lacking an internet connection because those gadgets will be obsolete.” (For fans of meta, I read this passage on the Nook).

So the killer app (pun intended) for any e-reader has to be that it makes you forget there are other ways to read digital books that don’t make you to lug around yet another device that only does one thing. As a lover of e-reading who’s never considered owning an e-reader, I was going to be a tough sell. And while I have some issues with the Nook, it is the first e-reader I would consider owning.

Why? The Nook is the first mechanism that has called me to read books for fun in ages. Software apps for e-reading are convenient, but they run on devices which are either too small (a smartphone) or too cumbersome and heavy (a tablet). This particular reader just feels better in the hand than others I have tried.

It’s not perfect. The touchscreen keyboard is merely adequate, but it’s fine for the little amount of typing you’ll do. And the Nook’s social layer seems like a work in progress, but it’s positioned only as a natural extension of the reading experience and does not feel at all forced.

But you spend the vast majority of your time using an e-reader for one thing alone: reading. It doesn’t need to be fancy, it needs to be comfortable, convenient, and accessible. At all those things, the Nook excels.

The newest Nook is so thin and light — about seven ounces, four less than its predecessor — that it’s really like carrying nothing at all. It’s not that much smaller than the Kindle, but at this scale, the difference is very noticeable. Most of the saving comes from using a pop-up touchscreen keyboard instead of a hardware keyboard. It fits comfortably in the back pocket of a pair of pants (not that you’d carry it that way) and I actually “lost” it in my very compact Booq laptop bag.

It’s easy to hold in any position, especially the all-important standing-on-the-moving-train and lying-in-bed varieties. The page-turning buttons are low-profile strips on either side of the face of the device, rather than the edge, as is the case with the Kindle. That seems to make it more natural to hold in one hand, since the entire edge of device can be cradled without any accidental clicks.

The touchscreen introduces some quirks. It’s easier to lose your place — I clicked on a footnote, and then something else accidentally, and landed on a random page, completely lost and with no idea what page I came from. It needs a way to retrace your steps. The touch keyboard is good enough to tap type, but the cancel button is too big. Clumsy fingers will lead to a lot of re-dos.

One other hardware quibble: The Nook is an e-ink reader, and like other e-ink readers, it is almost useless in low light. As one who has vowed to never again buy an Itty-Bitty Book Light, I’d happily give up some of the device’s two-month power surplus for a bit of on-demand LED glow. Tablets may be difficult to read in sunlight, but in low light, they still win.

In addition to the software for buying books and managing purchases, the Nook offers the three biggest sharing platforms: e-mail, Facebook and Twitter. You can link your Facebook, Twitter and Gmail accounts, and from there, recommend books to your friends and boast about your progress. If you’d like, you can also build a network of Nook friends by leveraging your Google contacts.

It’s refreshing that everything connects flawlessly on the backend, but the software clients flounder.

You can’t search your contacts when you want to e-mail — you have to scroll through them, which is ridiculous if you have a bulging address book.

When posting a tweet or a Facebook status message about a book, the Nook also throws in a link to the book’s selling page on Barnes & Noble’s website no matter what you write — fair enough, though if you want to trash what you’re reading, that hardly seems like a prime selling opportunity. Also, it is impossible to edit what the Nook “writes” when you’re broadcasting your progress. The full title of the Always On is 89 characters when you include the subtitle, and the “authors” are listed as Brian Chen and Brian X. Chen (spoiler alert: it’s one guy). And there’s nothing you can do about it. At least let me work in the author’s Twitter @handle.

Overall, the social component is half-baked. It aspires to do the quick hit things you might spontaneously want to do — “I’m halfway through!” — in the context of your reading experience, but it can’t compete with the social capabilities of your other mobile devices.

But hey, the Nook is for reading, not for tweeting. This is a pricey gadget that’s competing with a free app — like the Kindle, there are free Nook apps for phones and tablets — and as such, it has to offer a kickass reading experience. And it does.

It seems likely to win many new converts who’ve found themselves lured into Barnes & Noble’s brick-and-mortar retail stores to play with the device. The Kindle may have the first-mover advantage and a better-known name. But with this new version, the Nook is poised to break away — at least until the tablet makers build an e-reading experience good enough to render e-ink devices like these obsolete.

WIRED Nothing here gets in the way of a good read. Six-inch e-ink screen is crisp. Epic battery life. Hardware design eases one-handed operation. B&N sells over two million Nook books — more than twice what Amazon offers for the Kindle, which is just shy of a million titles.

TIRED Low light is a problem. Touch screen could be better. Social tools are meh, and the e-mail client is especially weak. Until e-book readers cost significantly less than $100 they won’t be everywhere — razors exist to sell blades.

Photo courtesy of Barnes & Noble

Let’s get one thing straight: The Chromebook is not really about the hardware.

Samsung’s Series 5 notebook is the mere physical vehicle for Google’s cloud-based vision of the future. It’s a world where users aren’t bogged down by needless accoutrements like cumbersome operating systems, optical drives or high-capacity local storage.

Which is why Chromebooks don’t come with any of that stuff.

Want to store your digital photos? Use the Chromebook’s SD card reader to upload images to Picasa, Google’s photo storage site. How ’bout a hankering for music? Google Music (now in beta) stores all your music on its servers, streaming songs directly to your many Google devices (Chromebook, Android phone or otherwise). The same goes for documents (Google Docs), calendars (Google Calendar) and most other things you could think to use on your notebook. Want some web-based games or more specific apps? Go to the Chrome web store. Everything happens within the confines of Chrome, Google’s own web browser.

Samsung’s Chromebook was unveiled a month ago at Google’s I/O developer event, and other manufacturers, beginning with Acer, will produce their own similar models this year.

The idea of a computing environment based entirely around web-based apps and storage has been on Google’s map for years. Even with looming fears of vendor lock-in, corporations, consumers and developers alike have all shown interest in the cloud model. Microsoft has its own cloud-based Live services, and most recently, Apple threw its chips onto the table with iCloud. But Google’s ecosystem, with its dozens of well-tuned apps, remains the most familiar and fully-baked.

Still, directly out of the box, it’s somewhat disorienting. Searching for a minimize button that never appears, countless vain attempts to alt-tab to my Twitter client, grasping at straws for an external (that is to say, non-browser-based) media player — all of which I’ve been trained to do after spending years on Windows and Mac desktops.

But after a short while, life in the browser-based environment became familiar. I’ve enjoyed using Chrome since the browser’s debut, and eventually welcomed the interface as my only means of control. Some essentials, like a file manager and pop-up media player within the browser window, are included. They’re easy enough to get a handle on, though a bit rudimentary.

The device is, however, susceptible to strain in other ways — namely, power-browsing. Opening multiple tabs running different types of pages (Flash games, videos, and text-based sites) left the Intel Atom dual-core chip struggling under the weight of too many tasks occurring at once. On several occasions, I had to kill off unresponsive tabs in the browser’s task manager.

Otherwise, the Series 5’s overall profile is admirable. At just under three and a half pounds, carrying a Chromebook around doesn’t feel like a rock in a bag on your hip. It’s lighter than the MacBook Pro I’m currently using by more than a pound, and it felt fine as I schlepped it around San Francisco during my workday. The Series 5 is also fairly thin when closed — 0.79 inches, to be exact. Obviously not MacBook Air-levels of thinness, but it won’t cost you a grand, either.

It’s sleek, too. The Series 5 comes in two finishes, Arctic White or Titan Silver — both plastic, and both offset nicely by the Chromebook’s black innards. Despite the notebook’s mostly plastic construction, it doesn’t come off as chintzy. Lightweight resin composition? Yes. Cheapo kid’s toy feel? Definitely not.

Much unlike Apple’s toasty laptops, the Chromebook didn’t set my crotch on fire after extended use. That’s a big plus, and certainly positive for any future children I may happen to father.

The Series 5 has a full-sized keyboard, so it’s not cramped and feels just like a regular laptop keyboard. Non-essential keys are gone, including the F1 through F18 keys, which are replaced by media controls. A Search key replaces Caps Lock. It opens a new tab in your browser when you press it. Hit it again and the tab disappears. If you miss Caps Lock (crazy!) you can re-map the keyboard to your tastes.

Samsung claims it takes eight seconds to power up, from the point of being completely off to seeing a usable browser window. When we tested this, it actually took only seven seconds to start up and be ready for use. It’s a seemingly trivial point, but think about what the device is used for: instant access to the web, e-mail and simpler tasks. You want something fast, not a rig that requires minutes to fully boot up.

Which gets at the heart of the device’s utility, and Google’s vision for us: simple, stripped-down browsing driving the majority of our computing experiences. For that purpose, but for that purpose alone, the Chromebook is a worthy vessel.

WIRED Ideal for dedicated Google apps users. Battery affords 7.5 hours of surfing time, even with the bright 12.1-inch screen at full bore. Built-in developer mode lets you tinker with the bare-bones Linux guts underneath.

TIRED Too many open tabs test the Chromebook’s resources. Only 100 MB of free monthly 3G service most likely means signing up for a new data plan. $500 leans towards the high end for a web-only notebook. Selection of web apps in Chrome web store leaves a lot to be desired.

Photos by Jon Snyder/Wired

The Aztecs invented the wheel, but only used it to make children’s toys. If the Aztecs had invented a tablet with a pressure-sensitive stylus, it would look a lot like the HTC Flyer.

In a tablet market crowded with companies trying to knock the iPad from its throne like kids at a carnival dunking booth, the Flyer tries to make a splash with a pressure-sensitive stylus. Without the stylus you have an unexceptional, expensive Android tablet with a 7-inch screen.

Unfortunately, shelling out for the stylus gives you an unexceptional, even more expensive tablet with a pointless gimmick.

Having a pressure-sensitive stylus is important to all sorts of people: artists, graphic artists, commercial artists, um, illustrators, people who draw, human beings who create works of art using lines and color… OK, it’s pretty much just artists. You don’t need a pressure-sensitive pen to write a grocery list or draw a quick map to the nearest brewpub. That’s why rollerball pens outsell Winsor and Newton ink brushes.

So of course they’re going to put enormous effort into making it useful for professional artists, or at least aspiring professionals, right?

Apparently not. It’s as if the Director of Directing Directions stood in front of the development team and said, “OK, we have to innovate here! I want us to make a drawing device that’s of almost no use to artists! Brainstorm! Go!”

“What if you could only draw in eight pre-chosen colors?”

“Great, Hendrickson! Brilliant! Anyone else?”

“Ooh! Only give them seven drawing tools to choose from! And one of them’s the eraser!”

“Nice, I like it. But it needs something.”

“Um…oh! All of the drawing tools use some sort of half-assed ‘natural texture’ so you can’t draw a clean black line!”

“Ah, great, that’s brilliant! Style over substance, that’s what I like to see. How about you, Fleming? You’ve been pretty quiet.”

“What if … ”

“Yes, yes, spit it out, we haven’t got all day.”

“What if it didn’t come with a drawing app?”

“I … what?”

“Don’t bundle a dedicated drawing app, with layers and flood fill and other things artists need. Instead, just have them draw on the standard Notepad! And, of course, none of the drawing apps in the Android Market will work with our stylus! It’ll be maddening!”

“Fleming, you’ve got a real future in this company.”

Now, to be fair, they did their best to make the stylus useless for non-artists as well. For instance — and I want you to pay close attention here — you can’t use the stylus as a pointing device. You have the stylus in your hand, you’re ready to go, but you can’t use it to click on buttons, icons, or input fields.

“Pen is for drawing,” explains the tutorial. “Tap the button with your finger to continue.”

So you have to keep the stylus ready, but not actually use it until you want to draw something. Better yet, there’s no stylus holder built into the device. I guess you keep it tucked behind your ear like a diner waitress from the ’40s.

And what if you don’t buy the stylus? You save $80, and you get a middle-of-the-road 7-inch tablet for $500. With a 1.5-Ghz processor, 1 GB of internal RAM and a 5-megapixel rear-facing camera, it’s notably more powerful than the current Wi-Fi-only Galaxy Tab, but costs $150 more. The Wi-Fi Motorola Xoom has a faster processor, a bigger screen — if you like that sort of thing — and a 2-megapixel front-facing camera to the Flyer’s 1.3 megapixel camera, and costs $100 more. If you’re set on a 7-inch Android tablet and better specs are worth the money to you, the Flyer’s worth looking at.

The tragic thing about the Flyer’s stylus is that it’s potentially just a software update away from actually being useful. It’s reasonably sensitive and well-constructed, so a well-written app could transform it from a toy to a tool overnight. But until then, there’s not much reason to buy it, and if nobody buys it, it might not be worth it for app developers to support the stylus. Meanwhile, digital artists everywhere continue to await the drawing tablet of their dreams.

WIRED Full-featured, if not very powerful. Pleasant interface as long as you don’t use the stylus.

TIRED Not particularly fast or particularly cheap. Runs Android 2.2, not 3.1, at least until HTC delivers the promised update. Stylus is a frivolous gimmick.

Photo by Lore Sjöberg

The Beyerdynamic DT 880 harkens back to a time when headphones were still tools, not fashion statements.

It’s the antithesis of today’s streamlined, plastic pieces of head candy. In fact, it’s probably no accident the latest version doesn’t look all that different from the first pair that rolled off the assembly line in 1980. Obviously, the 87-year-old German audio company felt there was little need mess with what already works. Thankfully, this fealty to the headphone’s rich history extends not just to design, but also sonic performance.

Your dad had the best gear back in the day. Some of it is still around, and it’s still awesome. Flashback!

Like earlier iterations, the new 880s retain their classic semi-open, over-the-ear design. This gives listeners a good middle-of-the-road solution for both sound isolation and fidelity. It also translates into supreme comfort during extended listening sessions. No cheap plastic or garish colors here, either. The 880s rely solely on materials like aluminum, steel, leather and velvet. Also gone is the flat-back ear cup styling of previous generations in favor of a more rounded design that adds a pinch of modernism.

But perhaps the biggest change to this storied headphone in recent years is the addition of a lower impedance (32-ohm) version. This is what I tested. Unlike older versions of the 880, this one is tailor-made for low-powered — non-amped — sources like your typical iPod, laptop or smartphone. Indeed, armed with two super-efficient drivers, these cans definitely provided more than enough oomph regardless of the source I used. And while I didn’t have the chance to compare them to the 250- or 600-ohm models, I can say that sound signature was as crisp and detailed as any headphone I’ve tried in recent memory.

Like other cans in this class, the 880s pack a superbly detailed soundstage, letting you pick out — and pick up on — instrumentation and nuances you’d never know where there on other headphones. This proved particularly rewarding when listening to sonic landscape master Amon Tobin’s new album, ISAM. Tobin, of course, is known for crafting otherworldly — and occasionally batshit-crazy — sounds by digitally manipulating real world ones. All of these sprung to life on the 880s with impressive depth and richness. Thankfully, the 880s also come with pinpoint-accurate bass which never got in the way even when I threw heavier stuff at them. Combine those attributes with lush mids that make voices sparkle and shimmer, and it’s hard to come up with any reason to dislike these monster cans.

Overall, if I had one qualm, it was that the 880s did seem to favor the higher frequencies. And depending on how you feel about treble, and what you’re listening to, they can occasionally sound harsh or overly bright at times. Although this can easily be fixed with a modest EQ correction.

That slight imbalance notwithstanding, these are still some extremely accurate, even clinical-sounding headphones. So be warned: All that overcompressed drivel sitting on your MP3 player or hard drive will sound exactly like what it is, with no overblown or bloated low-end to cover up all the shortcomings. However, when paired with a quality Apple Lossless, FLAC or — even better — CD source, the 880s will definitely make you want don a smoking jacket, light up a pipe and sit by the hi-fi — er, laptop — for hours.

WIRED Like a pair of velvet slippers for your ears. These are some of the comfiest cans I’ve ever put on my head. Zero ear fatigue even after epic listening sessions. Classic design cues and quality materials make for one gorgeous, yet tough, headphone. Detailed soundstage with tight, controlled bass. 32-ohm version is easy to drive and great for your iPod or laptop. Padded carrying case included.

TIRED Just as big and bulky as your dad’s old cans — not the most travel-friendly option. Semi-open design means some sonic leakage, so anyone sitting next to you will be listening to your music, too. Treble can be a bit harsh at times.

Mom and Dad use their Beyerdynamic headphones to tune out the kids.

Beyerdynamic DT-880 photo by Jim Merithew/Wired

At WWDC 2011, Apple announced that there are now more than 400K apps in its app store (and that more than 500K have been approved). The Android Marketplace has around 300K apps and is growing fast. The point is: There are a lot apps out there already, and more hit app stores every day. They’re going like hotcakes. But finding and discovering new apps that you actually care about? Eh, not so easy. Of course, it’s not for lack of trying. There are some awesome tools out there already trying to direct the fire hose and filter the noise.

Chomp, for example, is trying to become the Google search for apps. Zwapp, Frenzapp, and Appsfire are all bringing social to app discovery, while Heyzap is busy trying to kill game discovery. Today, Discovr adds a dy-no-mite app discovery tool to the crowd, going after the user experience problem in an awesome, though somewhat mathematical way: Interactive graphs.

Back in January, Discovr launched a cool new app for the iPad that displayed an interactive map of the music world that displays, among other things, connections between bands and artists. It also allows the user, with a few quick taps, to view musicians’ videos on YouTube and more. In fact, the app was so cool that it attracted 150K downloads in three days. Holy tamale. Today, Discovr is applying its music discovery and visualization model for iOS to apps, and it’s just as good, if not better. Granted, I’m a sucker for creative design and spatial data-aggregation tools. Nerdy as charged.

Discovr Apps is an interactive map of the 400K+ apps on the App Store. How does it work? Search for your favorite app, or choose one from Discovr’s featured apps, and bing-bang-boom, the app will show your app of choice in an interconnected network of apps that are linked based on their similarities. The similarities, like so many other recommendation services today, is a combo of machine algorithms and human curation.

The networks can be expanded on as you go, and if the page were large enough, you could probably create a massive, mind-melting map of all the apps on the app store. Obviously, in offering an interactive map as a method of app discovery, user experience is critical. If the interface sucks, the app is worthless. Discovr CEO Dave McKinney assures me that UX has been top priority for the startup since day 1. And from my quick demo, the interface is awesome: Smooth and seamless.

McKinney said that part of their secret to offering a good UX, especially if you’re going for a graphical presentation of data, is having a deep understanding of graphical interfaces and graph theory. Their solution? Bring in a guy with a PhD in graph theory. Tamas Nepusz is a doctor of graph theory that used to work at Last.fm as a research engineer, and he works exclusively on the graph code. It seems to be working.

So, when you find an app you like, you can read app descriptions, check out screenshots and ratings, or buy the app directly from the app store — or you can share your favorite apps and maps with your friends via Twitter, Facebook, or email.

In addition to Discovr’s human+machine approach, the startup wants people from all over the world to contribute to the data set and plans to add data-tuning from the crowd to make its recommendations even better. Oh, and an Android app is on the way. At this point, Discovr Apps is purely iOS.

For more, check out the video at the below.

Peter Pham, the president and a cofounder of mobile social startup Color, is no longer with the company, we’ve heard from multiple sources. The company launched publicly less than three months ago.

Color has been controversial because it raised so much venture capital – some $41 million – and had such a lousy launch reception. The service creates proximity based social networks based on who’s around you, a promising idea. But one that Color has so far failed to execute on.

In late April I criticized Color for making misstep after misstep and asked “How many do-overs does a startup get before users give up on it for good?”

This is another black mark for Color. We’ve heard mixed messages as to why Pham is leaving, but it’s never a good sign when a cofounder and executive leaves a startup just a few months after it launches.

So far, the company won’t comment about this story. And Pham hasn’t answered my phone calls.

In less than a month after its nationwide launch on May 14th, peer to peer marketplace Zaarly has crossed $1 million in posted transactions, and commemorated them with a colorful infographic depicting the break down of the early days of Zaarly.

Zaarly, which has raised more than $1 million in seed funding, boasts an impressive list of investors including Aydin Senkut’s Felicis Ventures, SV Angel, Lightbank, Gmail creator Paul Bucheit, movie star Ashton Kutcher and Angelist founder Naval Rivikant. TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington also invested in the company recently.

In same collaborative consumption space as startups like Taskrabbit and Gigwalk, Zaarly is a peer to peer marketplace where people who need to get a task done in a given locale to post it via iPhone to Zaarly. People who are interested in completing a task can also browse for available tasks on Zaarly via mobile.

Zaarly is available across the US, with active communities in eight cities. According to the above infographic, which breaks down the first $500K of Zaarly postings, Seattle has the most active buyers whereas Chicago has the most active sellers and the most completed transactions of all the top ten locations on the service.

The variety of Zaarly transactions ranges from someone in Lancaster wanting a delivery of fertile goose eggs ($8) to a request in San Francisco for “Find a 100 [business] loyalty cards” ($160). Founder Bo Fishback assures me that none of the listings are scraped, “All 100% legit”

So far the most offers on a single Zaarly post have been 16 and the most Zaarly-ied product has been the iPad. It’s also pretty shocking that nearly 7% of all tasks on Zaarly involve an Apple product, like ”I’ll pay $350 for a first gen iPad in the next day” or ”I’ll pay $1000 for an iPad 2 in the next ____.”

Moral of the story: Never underestimate the power of Apple fanboys.

Disclosure: TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington invested in Zaarly. See paragraph two above.

As we reported earlier, Pandora will start trading tomorrow on the New York Stock Exchange under the single letter symbol “P”. By doing so, it becomes the first Silicon Valley consumer Internet company to join exclusive one-letter stock ticker symbol club.

That club was once reserved for the big blue-chip industrial companies: Chrysler (C), Ford (F), Sears (S), U.S. Steel (X), and Woolworth (Z). Of that list, only Ford and U.S. Steel remain. Chrysler was acquired by Daimler and lost the C to Citibank. Sears lost the S to Sprint Nextel. Woolworth went out of business.

Of course, there are already several tech companies in the single letter club. Agilent Technologies (A), NetSuite (N), Sprint Nextel (S), AT&T (T). But none are pure consumer-based Internet companies.

Zillow, the real-estate website, applied for the NASDAQ ticker symbol Z in a filing last month. But, it hasn’t started trading yet. Pandora has beaten them in the race.

In the past, the NYSE has said it was holding M for Microsoft (MSFT) and I for Intel (INTC). M is Macy’s but I is open. There are no signs Microsoft or Intel are planning a change.

There was also talk at one time that Yahoo (YHOO) might take the Y spot, which is now at Alleghany. Go figure. Perhaps because it ends in Y.

What about possible stock symbols for Facebook, Twitter, or Groupon. F is already Ford, T is AT&T, and G is Genpact. In Groupon’s filing, they wrote they expect to apply for the symbol GRPN. Symbols don’t usually change unless there is an acquisition, or the company goes bust, so those companies would need to pick something else.

At one time, stock symbols were printed on the ticker tape and handwritten on transaction slips. So, shorter was faster. Today stock symbols have less importance, but the single letter companies can still say they are part of a very exclusive club.

My grandfather used to try to fool people with a joke saying of the thousands and thousands of companies traded on the stock market, how many have a single letter as a ticker symbol? He always enjoyed when someone not thinking clearly might say 50 or 100. He would proudly tell them there can only be 26. With Pandora getting added tomorrow, there will only be 20.

Exclusive – TechCrunch has just learned that Wimdu, a recently launched Airbnb clone that has already managed to irk the latter, has raised a whopping $90 million round.

The capital injection comes from European investors Kinnevik and the infamous Samwer brothers’ Rocket Internet.

These investors are no strangers to the cloning of successful tech companies (they sold Groupon-inspired City Deal to Groupon, and started a Zappos clone called Zalando).

(Kinnevik also recently invested in a Russion Zappos clone dubbed Sapato.ru)

Notably, Airbnb is also raising a huge round of funding ($100 million or more) at a staggering $1 billion valuation, so you might say Wimdu isn’t just copying their idea and business model but also their financing strategy.

Seriously, though, if you’re somewhat familiar with Airbnb, you’ll have an easy job learning what Wimdu is: a community-driven marketplace for private spaces. The startup says it currently lists 10,000 apartments in over 150 cities around the world, in less than 100 days.

Already, its team has grown to 400 employees, working from 15 offices worldwide.

Wimdu is not the only Airbnb clone. There’s also 9flats, which recently raised capital from Silicon Valley investor Redpoint Ventures and was founded by German entrepreneur (and founder of Yelp clone Qype) Stephan Uhrenbacher.

Another German clone, Accoleo, was actually acquired by Airbnb just two weeks ago.

As we reported last week, Airbnb recently sent out an email to its 100,000+ hosts, warning them for ‘impostor websites’ like the above-mentioned clones, who they refer to as ‘scam artists’. From our previous article:

Why is Wimdu and its Chinese subsidiary such a threat? Well Wimdu and Airizu were created by the German Samwer brothers, prior Facebook investors whose modus operandi is creating European clones of popular American Internet services. The Samwers most profitably sold their eBay clone Alando.de to eBay in 1999 and their Groupon clone CityDeal to Groupon itself for around €100 million in 2010.

The Airbnb email does everything but call out the Samwer brothers by name for their questionable cut and paste innovation tactics, “these scam artists have a history of copying a website, aggressively poaching from their community, then attempting to sell the company back to the original” and “they claim that they are part of Ebay and/or Groupon.”

Music streaming service Pandora has priced its IPO at $16 per share, valuing the company at $2.6 billion. The company originally set the range of its IPO at $7 to $9 per share, at a market cap of $1.3 billion; but upped the range last week to $10 to $12 per share, giving the company a valuation of $1.9 billion.

Pandora’s stock will begin trading tomorrow morning on The New York Stock Exchange under the symbol “P.” The company expects to raise as much as $235 million in the offerring and will offer 6,000,682 shares of its common stock with the selling stockholders are offering 8,683,318 shares of common stock in the IPO.

Pandora initially filed its S-1 in February. A few weeks ago, the company released its most recent revenue numbers, which reflected an increase in both sales and usage for the internet radio service.

For example, Pandora is adding a new registered user every second and now ahs 94 million users. In Pandora’s fiscal year ended January 31, 2011, Pandora streamed 3.8 billion hours of radio listening. In the three months ending April 30, 2011 Pandora posted revenues of $51 million, up from $29.6 million during the same period in 2010.

Pandor follows in the footsteps of Fusion-io, LinkedIn and Yandex, which all increased their pricing significantly prior to going public. And the opening trading price for these companies’ stocks all rose as well. We’ll see where Pandora opens tomorrow.

Grace Chu Lee from Twitter’s Business Development team earlier tweeted out and then deleted a Twitter feature that has as of yet gone unheard of beyond a select few, “Follow Recommendations.” “Follow Recommendations,” which lets you create lists of people you think others should follow, has been around for months we’re hearing but hasn’t been publicized much outside of Twitter itself (Lee calls it a “hidden” feature in the tweet).

Ostensibly “Follow Recommendations” allow you to create a personal Suggested Users List for people who sign up for Twitter directly through your profile (for example if they encounter one of your hilarious tweets in the wild and are inspired to sign up for Twitter).

Users wishing to take advantage of Follow Recommendations can do so by creating a plain old Twitter list and including the hashtag #WelcomeToTwitter in the list’s description (more detailed instructions in the slideshow above).

Users who sign up for Twitter from your profile will see your recommendations like in the screenshot below. But why would this be useful to anyone you ask? Well from what I’m hearing it wasn’t really intended for hoi polloi, but was mainly marketed to celebrities and brands that have a critical mass of people joining Twitter through their profiles presumably. Which is probably why it hasn’t seen the light of day until now.

When asked if Twitter was sitting on similar hidden features, Twitter Communications Rep Carolyn Penner told me in a DM, “There might be other ‘secret features’ but I don’t know what others don’t know!”

Exciting! Keep an eye out Twitter sleuths.

Sometimes, it’s all about the experience.

Without its finely tuned user experience, Yelp would be just another reviews site. Tivo would be just another DVR. Twitter would just be a fancy status broadcaster. Their user experiences, though — that feeling that things “just work” — keep people coming back. A simple idea grows, the product evolves, and eventually they become the names we all recognize.

Photogram isn’t a complicated idea. You take 4 photos, slap a title on the whole lot, pick a cutesy little theme, and blast it out to e-mail, Facebook, or Twitter — and that’s it. But something about the experience has me hooked.

On Tuesday, ClearEdge Power— a cleantech startup that makes 5-kilowatt stationary fuel cells— announced that it won a $2.8 million grant from the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) to gets its technology out to the market more quickly. Targeted customers for ClearEdge Power include the owners and operators of hotels, groceries, schools, medical centers and fast food restaurants, among other light industrial power users.

The ClearEdge5 fuel cell (image, below) is about the size of a regular home refrigerator and produces power from natural gas. It is also designed to recycle the heat it generates for use within a facility where it is installed. Heat generated by the fuel cells’ power production can be harnessed, for example, to warm up a pool, a laundry room or the air in a building.

The PNNL grant project is part of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fuel Cell Technologies Program, and is one of a slew of activities designed to: “support the development and deployment of hydrogen and fuel cell technologies, [domestically]” according to a PNNL press statement. Through the grant, PNNL funds up to 50 percent of the total project cost for each system ClearEdge Power installs.

Given $2.8 million in funding, ClearEdge Power agreed to install 38 systems for ten organizations that the company hand-picked because they were reputed sustainability leaders in their industries or geographic regions. As part of the deal, the organizations that get the half-priced systems and services agreed to allow PNNL access to their fuel cell’s performance data for five years [updated: Jun. 14, 2011 7:45 p.m. ET].

The grant is a first-of-its-kind award, according to PNL project manager Mike Rinker. Most D.O.E. grants are to advance research and development and manufacturing, he explained.

Rinker’s team chose ClearEdge Power for the grant because, he said, “They had a system that was commercially available already in the 5-kilowatt to 100-kilowatt range, and could be deployed quickly.”

The ClearEdge5 uses an electrochemical process to convert natural gas (or propane) to electricity and heat. It’s a smaller unit than those offered by Bloom Energy, UTC Power or Fuel Cell Energy.

The company claims its systems: reduces the environmental impact of producing electricity by reducing carbon dioxide emissions by about 35 to 40 percent compared to traditional combustion power generation, and by avoiding the emission of volatile organic compounds, ash and particulates, to trace levels.

PNNL’s Rinker also noted:

“It’s hard to determine which sectors within the category of light industrial power users are the biggest consumers of energy from fossil fuels. It varies regionally, for one. Most companies in this category are grid-connected so they take what the utility can give them.

In Southern California and Northern California, a lot of that power comes from coal*. That’s why it makes sense to introduce businesses in this area, and in this category, or in areas that have access to a natural gas pipeline to fuel cell alternatives.

With companies like a 24-7 medical center, a hotel or a fast food restaurant that needs reliable electricity and heat, constantly, you can use both the heat and the power generated by a fuel cell to offset greenohouse gases, and make the case for the efficiency for this technology.

We’ll be starting to track the data in September this year, and will have a full report by the end of two years, with some research to offer before the project is over.”

[*Ed’s note: coal is generally regarded as one of the most polluting forms of energy, if one of the more affordable, in the U.S.]

According to Mike Upp, vice president of marketing at ClearEdge Power, his comapny currently has 225 full-time employees, has so far sold 100 fuel cell systems and is headquartered in Hillsboro, Oregon with plans to expand operations on the east coast this year.