Category: Tech news

According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, heart disease is the leading cause of death in the United States. As this is the case, there are many of us in the U.S. — and across the globe — who have had heart disease or cardiac illnesses affect our lives in many unpleasant ways. Today, thanks to advances in modern technology, we are beginning to see services, devices, and applications that may one day prevent heart attacks and heart-related conditions (currently, 1 American has a heart attack every 34 seconds). SHL Telemedicine, which is bringing personalized health care to mobile, announced today at Disrupt NYC a new medical gadget called “smartheart”. Smartheart is a lightweight personal electrocardiogram (or ECG) that allows you to monitor your heart in realtime.

Using smartheart, within 30 seconds, any end user is able to record a hospital-grade ECG and transmit it to their doctor, cardiologist, or hospital to get a diagnosis in realtime. Those who’ve experienced electrocardiograms at a hospital or doctor’s office know that the process typically involves lying down on a bed, while doctors prod you with multiple sticky monitors, attaching them to different places on the chest. Smartheart, on the other hand, is lighter and sleeker than traditional ECGs, only involves one monitor, and can be strapped around the chest. Smartheart ECGs, as I was lucky enough to demonstrate onstage, can be made standing up.

The accompanying free app, which is available on iPhone, Android, and BlackBerry, connects to the ECG wirelessly, and displays, through a nifty interface, the level of battery power and connectivity. Once the device has been configured with the app, connection happens within seconds. Then, you’re free to begin taking your pulse, so to speak. In as little as 30 seconds, the app will display your results and give you the opportunity to email them directly to your physician. For those who find themselves in harrowing circumstances, the app will immediately identify an irregular or abnormal heart condition and send an alert to the user in realtime.

And the best thing? The device itself will cost $500. That’s less than the price of an iPhone, and generally speaking, the iPhone (itself) can’t save your life. Yet. Further data analysis, reports, and other medical advice will be made available on a subscription basis for what Smartheart VP Shay Leibovitz said will be a low price, “way under $20 a month”, he says.

Now, as someone who had heart surgery at a young age, I am without a doubt biased towards this kind of technology. But, to me, a free application and a lightweight, hospital-grade, and cheap device that can be used by anyone with a smartphone, from anwhere, is pretty cool. Really cool. Not only that, but the potential positive medical effects a device like this could have is dramatic. Considering that Leibovitz says that 50 percent of heart-related deaths happen before one can get to the hospital, preemptive monitoring and treatment can have some amazing life-saving potential.

Undeniably attractive and super skinny, Sony Ericsson’s Xperia Arc is ready for a career as a runway model.

This fashionable specimen measures a mere 0.46 inches thick at its thinnest point, the middle of the concave arc that runs vertically down the back of the phone. It manages to make my iPhone 3GS look almost obese in comparison.

Slimness is a virtue in devices, as it reduces that embarrassing Visible Phone Line in your pocket. But premium phones usually have a bit of heft to them, and in that respect, the Xperia Arc feels a little too thin. Flimsy, even. At 4.13 ounces, it’s incredibly lightweight, thanks mostly to the removable plastic rear cover that gives access to the battery, SIM card and SD memory card.

Fragile as it seems, it’s a solid, well-performing Gingerbread phone with an excellent camera and a beautiful screen. There are some problems with the software, and a few head-scratchers in the design, but overall, I can recommend it. The phone is scheduled to arrive in the United States this summer, most likely on AT&T or T-Mobile networks.

The design generates plenty of interest during bourgeois dinner parties when it’s time for the ubiquitous “pull out your iPhone” ceremony after you run out of HBO shows to talk about. The Xperia Arc isn’t an iPhone, and its looks are definitely eye-catching.

Cool tooling aside, the backlit 4.2-inch “reality display” is reason alone to consider the Xperia Arc. The LED touchscreen is powered by Sony’s mobile Bravia engine, a descendant of what the company uses in its HDTVs. It has excellent color reproduction and brightness, even during sunny days.

The iPhone 4’s screen has better resolution — 960 x 640 pixels compared to the Xperia’s 854 x 480 pixels — and is better overall, but the Xperia Arc screen is lovely to behold. When you need a bigger screen for gaming or watching movies, the Xperia Arc has enough power to drive an HDTV using the HDMI connector that Sony Ericsson supplies with the phone.

The camera was probably my favorite feature. The phone sports a Sony Exmor R sensor for its camera and a bright, f/2.4 lens. The images it produces are sharp, fairly noise-free and have great color and contrast. Overall, it takes some of the best photos I’ve seen from a mobile phone.

I shot some test images to compare the Xperia Arc to the current cellphone camera king, the Nokia N8. With its 12-megapixel sensor and f/2.8 Carl Zeiss lens, the Nokia should win this match. But images from the Xperia Arc have better contrast and richer colors. The Xperia’s camera is quick too, unlike the N8s, which needs thinking time as it processes images.

Thanks to the Exmor sensor, the Xperia Arc does very well in low-light situations. This is great because the LED flash is too powerful, often bleaching out the subject you’re photographing, and should be used with caution.

Video clips look good in 720p HD, but the Xperia Arc’s microphone picks up sound in the opposite direction of where you’re pointing the camera, so you’ll get a lot of extraneous noise in the recordings. What a shame.

Another failure with the camera is the shutter button. It’s stiff and small with very little travel — a bit like the Power button, which also suffers from the same awkward size and action. It’s easy to blur images because you have to press so hard on the button, so I resorted to tapping the screen to take pics instead.

Camera-lens placement is also an issue. It’s easy to cover it up with the fingers of your left hand because the lens is right where you’d hold the phone. And where’s the front-facing camera for video calling?

The tables here at Pier 94 are full of enterprising hackers, swapping code and networking furiously. The Red Bull is flowing freely and snacks crunch underfoot — pigeons flit to and fro looking for crumbs and perhaps some seed funds. And it’s only just beginning.

The hacking will continue all night, punctuated by API demonstrations by the likes of Twitter, Qualcomm, and Google, and at 9:30 tomorrow morning the projects will be submitted. There are way more teams and individuals than our last Hackathon, which was already far larger than the one before. Fortunately, our new venue is very spacious — cavernous, even. They’ll need the space after the pizza arrives and things start getting over-savory.

Teams are still forming and projects coalescing, but the Hackathon lifestyle is already taking hold and the cans are piling up. Here are a few pictures from the early hours of the event, to be followed by interviews, demos, and the inevitable snoring hackers on air mattresses. You can add your own to the pool by tagging your tweets and photos with #tcdisrupt and #hackdisruptNYC2011, and you can always find more at the TechCrunch Flickr page.

Tomorrow morning at 10:30 is when the teams do their rapid-fire presentations and attempt to impress the judges. We’ll we wrapping up around 2:45 or 3, at which point one lucky project (the last Hackathon’s winner was WiseDame) will get a chance to compete with our Startup Battlefield companies on stage during Disrupt proper. The presentations are always entertaining, so be sure to tune into our live broadcast.

Bitcoin. Oh, man, where to begin. Its Hype-O-Meter got cranked to 11 this week, and breathless histrionics are everywhere. Death and Taxes called this new currency “a seismic event“; Adam Cohen says it’s nothing but a giant scam; Jason Calacanis calls it “the most dangerous project we’ve ever seen“; and they’re all completely wrong. It’s interesting, and innovative, and down the line it might even be important … but in many crucial ways, Bitcoin is nothing new.

Matthew Ingram at GigaOM wrote a good Bitcoin 101 piece, but a summary of that summary, for those too lazy to click: it’s an anonymous online currency whose transactions and monetary supply are verified by digital cryptography and maintained by an open-source peer-to-peer network. Computers on the Bitcoin network can also “mine” new bitcoins, which are generated at a fixed rate. And, crucially, no more than 21 million will ever exist. (~7 million are currently extant.)

“So what?” you may ask, and not without reason—but Bitcoins are in fact worth something. Right now you can sell them for ~$7 a pop at any of several Bitcoin exchanges. The EFF accepts Bitcoin donations. Creating a secure distributed currency infrastructure is no mean feat; creating one that people actually use is more impressive still. I don’t want to understate that accomplishment. But, people, we have been here before, many times.

In 1932, the town of Wörgl, Austria, introduced a new currency that was so successful that it is still referred to as the “Miracle of Wörgl“, although the Austrian government soon shut it down for violating the government’s monopoly on printing money. Communities have been experimenting with local/community currencies ever since. (Not to be confused with “company scrip”, the Internet equivalent of which is Flooz, or Facebook Credits.) Bitcoin is little more than a reasonably well-designed local currency liberated from the shackles of geography.

There is one key difference between Bitcoin and Wörgl; no government can shut down Bitcoin’s printing presses. (Which aren’t necessarily figurative.) And that’s exactly why it’s been so successful so far—enough anarchists and libertarians, who have long hated fiat currencies and longed for the return of the gold standard, have flocked to it that it actually has value. But they’re a tiny minority, extremely unlikely to grow into a significant movement, and even if they do, it won’t much matter. Currencies, be they fiat, gold, or fixed-supply, are a collective fiction: they only have value if a critical mass of people believe they do. If the US and EU want to kill Bitcoin, they need only make it illegal, and that critical mass will vanish.

But why would any American or European business adopt Bitcoin in the first place? It’s an elegant and disruptive solution desperately looking for a problem. There’s nothing wrong with the dollar, euro, or yuan. As Victor Grishchenko cogently points out in his analysis, “Any competing e-money system needs to offer at least the same level of security, coverage, liquidity and privacy, which is hardly the case with Bitcoin at this moment.” In the developed world, Bitcoin is a non-starter. At best it might eke out an existence as a distributed local currency for hardcore libertarians.

…but the developing world is another matter. Consider Zimbabwe, recently plagued by hyperinflation so rampant that when I was last there prices doubled every few weeks and gasoline could only be purchased on the black market with hard currency. They’ve since given up and simply adopted foreign currency wholesale. Meanwhile, mobile electronic payments are taking off in a big way all over sub-Saharan Africa. It isn’t much of a stretch to imagine Zimbabwe in ten years’ time—or a whole group of developing nations with a history of crippling inflation—adopting a new currency that is independent, incorruptible, and anti-inflationary by design. In short, something a whole lot like Bitcoin. No, it isn’t the future, but it just may point the way.

[Image: Jeff Hester, Flickr]

More Bitcoin links, for the terminally interested: OMG they’re all totally crazy. No we’re not. Bitcoin, our greatest hope for liberty. Bitcoin, the Wikileaks of monetary policy. Bitcoin will be made illegal. The Bitcoin bubble. Bitcoin’s collusion problem. The Bitcoin lottery. Reality distortion. The Napster of banking. BoingBoing discussion. Safer Bitcoin transactions. Betting on Bitcoin. Is the Bitcoin algorithm new? Namecoin.

The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, Dick Hardt, and Steve Gillmor — got all LinkedIn in the wake of the startup’s successful IPO. Amid the fear mongering about another tech bubble, it seemed more likely that LinkedIn was the first of at least a trio of big social plays going public. Facebook and Twitter seem no brainers, each with their own dynamics in terms of revenue plus virality. And then there’s Groupon and maybe Zynga.

But the real question was not whether hype trumps value, but what’s next as the intersection of technology and media accelerates. This year’s broadcast upfronts seemed primed for disruption, with most networks junking their entire drama debuts from a year ago in favor of big budget sci-fi and Sheenless comedies. Meanwhile Netflix continues to mushroom as it becomes the next HBO, or some supernode unlike anything since the agencies took over from the film studios in the ’50s. King Harvest will surely come.

Passionate biodiesel hobbyists have long relied on their local diner’s supply of used cooking oil to power their cars, but a unit that automatically converts oil to fuel could help restaurants do it themselves.

The BioPro 190, made by Springboard, is a tall stainless steel box containing a biodiesel processor that that mixes, heats and separates used cooking oil, producing ready-to-pump biodiesel in about 48 hours. Both animal and vegetable oils can be used, and though the oil requires the addition of methanol, sulphuric acid and a catalyst to be processed, these are the only steps in the recipe to to fueling any diesel-run vehicle. While vehicles typically require biodiesel conversion to run on on biofuels, Springboard claims their fuel can power any diesel engine without being converted.

This could be a big step forward for biodiesel which is often inconsistent in quality when manually produced. It could also provide a new revenue stream for the restaurant industry.

BioPro 190 units sell for $9,995, but buyers will have to find suppliers for the sulfuric acid, methanol and catalyst to mix with their cooking oil on their own. A smaller BioPro 150 model sells for $5995, with an additional charge for a fuel pump.

This video demonstrates the machine in action:

I’ll bet that got your attention. Finally, an app that wants to buy you a drink. Well, not exactly, but it’s the next best thing. LoSo is a location-based social media app for the iPhone that re-launches today to bring the best parts of Foursquare, Yelp, and OpenTable together in one app for your mobile phone. An ambitious goal, yes, but to counterbalance that, LoSo is targeting a very specific market: your local restaurants and bars. So, on the one hand, LoSo is addressing a problem cited by many small businesses in using Groupon: They’re happy to have a blast of new customers taking advantage of a big discount, but they want to see loyalty, not single-serving customers. And, on the other hand, LoSo wants you to be rewarded for doing just that: By being (or becoming) a loyal customer at your favorite local eatery or watering hole.

While this may not be a “new” idea, it’s worth checking out. In a nutshell, LoSo is taking the better parts of the aforementioned services (and, maybe Citysearch) to create a realtime guide for going out on the town. Currently, the app offers 200K realtime feeds for 700K local bars and restaurants, allowing you to see happy hours, drink specials, dinner specials, what bands are playing, and more. LoSo ranks these eateries and bars according to total number of checkins, so you can get a sense of which place has the most activity.

Taking a page from Foursquare, LoSo encourages users to checkin from their favorite spots, pooling these checkins in live Twitter and Facebook-like feeds, which you can get a sense of from the screenshots above. By clicking “IMHere”, you can show your friends where you are, as pins drop down on a Google Map to display your current location. You can navigate this interactive map of local venues and leave posts that tell your friends where you are.

With each checkin, you earn a point. Earn ten points and you can redeem your points for free swag. You can make checkins private, or public. And, probably the coolest part, is that you can post videos you take while being over-served and post them to Facebook and Twitter. They show up on the business pages of the place where you’re eating, which is hopefully great for the local business. As long as the videos aren’t troll-ish, of course.

As to the reward system, each time you checkin at a local spot, you earn a certain amount of points, most often 10 points. In the meantime, LoSo has encouraged the local business you’re patronizing to set up a rewards page, describing the types of rewards you can earn and how many checkins it takes to take advantage. Most frequently, it only takes one or two checkins, LoSo CEO Rich Rodgers tells me, before you might be throwing back a margarita gratis. LoSo will also be offering points of its own, so if a user starts checking in frequently (to any place), they will become eligible for LoSo rewards as well. Which could be anything from a cruise to 3 months of free HDTV, Rodgers says.

But what’s to stop people from doing drive-by checkins to take advantage of deals? To discourage these miscreants, Rodgers says that part of the app’s secret sauce is that you will only be eligible if you’re within 100 feet of the establishment, and the reward will only become available after 10 minutes. So you can’t just throw back a quick one and then run, like a coward..

“We set out to create a mobile app that was built around the idea that mobile is a mentality of the here and now,” said Rodgers. “We started by building the largest social media connected database of any city guide”.

While there are definitely game mechanics at play here, unlike FourSquare and other game-related retail “directories”, LoSo gives people more than just listings and status. LoSo’s Restaurant Rewards Points are good for free drinks, eats, and prizes, and each check in on LoSo also counts as a checkin on Foursquare and Facebook Places, so all checkins can be done from one app. So, users can not only become Mayor in Foursquare, but stay current on Facebook, earn restaurant rewards, and accrue LoSo Loyalty points.

Rodgers also tells me that LoSo recently closed a $350K round of seed funding from various New York-based angels and VCs, allowing them to do some more iterating and a little bit of hiring. But, how is the free LoSo app going to make money, you ask (aside from seed funding)? Well, unfortunately, there may be some ads. Rodgers told me they won’t be obnoxious, but if they are, don’t shoot the messenger. LoSo is also offering local businesses the opportunity to let the startup take over all of their social media activities, email and SMS marketing, and all that good stuff. The subscription will cost $100 a month.

The other bad news is that, though you can use the app anywhere (and they’ve already added 800K places), rewards are only available in Philadelphia. But, Rodgers says that if the experiment goes according to plan, they should be expanding to other U.S. cities within the year. With how expensive eating can be in the Bay Area, I hope LoSo makes it out to the West Coast before I’m bankrupt.

Heading into TechCrunch Disrupt, New York, we pulled a couple excerpts from Chris Dixon’s freshly shot Founder Stories interview with Gilt Groupe’s CEO & Founder, Kevin Ryan. Ryan, who will be speaking at the conference dismisses talk of the so-called “tech bubble” and dives into the “renaissance” of the New York Tech scene.

Responding to a recent “Economist” article which cautions of a tech bust, Ryan, the former DoubleClick CEO says, “They are completely wrong.”

Ryan and Dixon break it down above. (Note that this was filmed before LinkedIn’s blowout IPO on Thursday).

In the below exchange Dixon and Ryan discuss the emergence of the New York Tech scene. Ryan tells Dixon, “I could not be more bullish about what is happening in New York.” Going on to say, “the core fundamentals in New York are fantastic.”

Ryan also explains why New York is a pipeline for talent, and why Boston is hardly mentioned in the same breath.

Ever wonder how super angel and man-about-town Chris Sacca spends his Friday nights? Well, right now you can find him at Turntable.fm, a stealthy, you-can-only-get-in-if-you-know-someone online DJ party. I just stumbled onto it by accident. You can only gain entry if you are Facebook friends with someone already inside.

As it happens, I knew some people. Turntable.fm is a project of Seth Goldstein and Billy Chasen, the two guys who brought us Stickybits. You enter and there are different DJ rooms to choose from. There are probably 25 people there right now (this is still in private alpha). But in one room called “Let’s rock old-ish hip-hop,” there was Sacca, Goldstein, YouTube’s Hunter Walk, and Mike Marquez of CODE Advisors. Sacca was playing “Push It” by Salt-n-Pepa, up on the DJ platform (he gets to wear the space helmet because he has a lot of points, which are awarded to him by other people in the room who like what he plays).

Everyone in a room has an avatar and can chat with each other. You can create your own playliist and get up on the DJ table to battle it out. People tend to talk a lot of smack. But it’s fun, and addictive enough that I didn’t leave after 20 seconds. Turntable.fm needs a lot of fine-tuning (in fact a lot of the chat was about features it coud use, such as better animations for the avatars or different ways to award points.

In the end, Turntable.fm is really about hanging out with people and discovering music. If a DJ is playing a song you like, you can add it to your playlist, buy it on iTunes, findi it on Last.fm, or launch Spotify.

RadiumOne is emerging as a leader in a new breed of advertising networks, with enhanced targeting based on social data. The company is positioning itself to lock in data sources before competitors even get rolling.

“Behavioral targeting in advertising led to double digit increases in effectiveness,” RadiumOne’s CEO Gurbaksh Chahal tells me. And he should know, this is his third advertising network. The last one, BlueLithium, sold to Yahoo in 2007 for $300 million. “But it’s commoditized now, and it’s time to innovate and differentiate.”

The key is to know what ad to show to a person, and when. That can turn low value remnant inventory to premium ad space, no matter what site or service that ad is being served on.

When a user visits a site the ad networks determine in real time, often through an auction, what ad to show you based on the profile that’s been built for you. RadiumOne builds a different profile for you than it’s competitors, though, and may grab ads that others leave untouched (or just pay more). The reason? They’ve built your profile based on what your friends like, too.

These ads appear to work. One retailer who was achieving $8 per dollar spent on advertising increased that to $14/dollar spent with RadiumOne, says the company. A credit card company decreased cost per acquisition from $200 to $75.

This also makes intuitive sense, of course. The problem is really how to get the right data. Previously only Facebook has a high level view of hundreds of millions of Internet users and are able to build an interest graph based on what those users’ friends like. It explains why Google is so interested in being Facebook – it’s all about the ad dollars.

The Data Is The Hard Part

How does RadiumOne build the interest graph at scale? Via data deals with all those sharing widgets you see on websites from companies like ShareThis, AddThis and AddToAny. Users of those services spread links on social networks. Through a combination of unique URL shorteners and cookies they are able to create a profile for people clicking on the links, as well as the implied social connection.

RadiumOne has deals with many of these widget providers, covering hundreds of millions of Internet users. They combine the data from the partners to extract more useful information about relationships and interests, and then target ads based on that. So if you’re using those widgets, or clicking on links from friends that use the widgets, there’s a good chance you’re seeing RadiumOne served ads around the web.

Here’s where things get really interesting. RadiumOne is using the $21 million warchest from their just-announced funding to begin to buy the widget guys outright, ensuring that no one else down the road can get the data. And anyone they don’t buy should watch out. RadiumOne says eventually they’ll probably pay sites to include their widget to get more distribution and data, possibly edging out anyone they haven’t bought.

If they pull this off, and there’s no reason to think they won’t, Everyone is going to want to own this company. Chahal, who dropped out of high school to start his first company at 16, may have his third ad network liquidity event on his hands in the near future. I can’t wait to see what his fourth looks like.

Google is on a mission to make the Web faster. One thing that slows down pageload times are fat image files. Even JPEG and PNG files can get pretty big. So Google is developing a new image format called WebP (which is a sister format to its WebM project for videos).

The key to making image files on the Web smaller without losing sharpness is better compression of the original file. Today, Google announced via the Chromium blog that the compression algorithms for WebP just got better and that they can even handle different parts of an image separately so that parts of it can be displayed without waiting for the entire image to be compressed and decompressed.

The images above, for instance, are from this gallery comparing JPEG to WebP. The WebP images are significantly smaller, but look just as sharp. Can you tell the difference? Unfortunately, WebP is only supported in Chrome and Opera browsers. Google products such as Gmail, Picassa Web albums, and Google Instant Previews also support WebP. But other than Opera, it’s pretty much an all-Google affair.

Websites aren’t going to start using WebP images just for Google Chrome visitors. But if it does speed things up without reducing the quality of images, other browsers will start supporting it as well or else be left behind.

If you’ve seen George Clooney and Jason Reitman’s Up In The Air, you know that George Clooney’s character in the film is the epitome of a savvy, frequent flier. His life’s ambition is to accumulate miles, and he knows exactly what his rewards packages entail. Most of us, though we may similarly heavy travel schedules, are by no means masters of miles or travel rewards. If you’re anything like me, you can’t even remember which mileage programs you’ve enrolled in. Thus, Superfly, an Israeli startup emerging from beta today, wants to help you become more like George Clooney’s character in Up In The Air — and less like me. (Always a good thing.)

Armed with a new domain, new design, and fresh funding, Superfly’s goal is to not only help users organize travel rewards (be they frequent flier miles or hotel rewards), but actually educate users on how to use them to maximize their value. According to Superfly, there are currently between 17 and 22 trillion unused miles and points floating around travel accounts today, and these points are valued at between $500 and 600 billion.

Clearly, while users are spending a great deal of time traveling and accumulating miles, they’re not making use of them. This is largely due to the fact that airlines craftily make it difficult to understand and appreciate the value of the rewards, where and how to redeem them, etc.

Superfly is mainly targeting under-40 business travelers that carry multiple reward cards, aiming to make their lives easier by tracking their reward balances, rate of accrual, while managing the various terms of airline policies, to put concrete dollar values on their rewards. The startup does this by aggregates a user’s travel information and running a comprehensive analysis of users’ travel habits, plotting their behavior patterns against available rewards programs.

Superfly offers a simple interface that displays miles earned over time, as well as spending patterns, that make it easy to see how close one is to achieving various rewards. The startup’s platform then serves you suggestions as to airlines, accommodations, flight times, and more that will help maximize miles and rewards earned.

The startup plans to monetize by charging credit card companies and airlines for referral when a user takes their suggestions. Founders Jonathan Meiri and Zviki Cohen estimate material revenue per user at about $29, even through the service is completely free.

Superfly recently closed a seed round from a number of high profile angels, including the founders of Israeli tech companies like NESS, and 888.com CEO Gigi Levy. The startup has brought in $600K to date, and CEO Jonathan Meiri said that the startup plans to have 100 million-plus miles under management from launch.

Firefox beta for Android has been updated today with the ability for users to turn on the “Do Not Track” privacy feature, making it one of the first mobile browsers to offer the privacy option.

Mozilla’s Do Not Track allows users to have more control over how their browsing behavior is tracked and used online. When the feature is enabled, Firefox will tell advertising networks and other websites and applications that you want to opt-out of third-party tracking for purposes like behavioral advertising. Basically, Mozilla implements an HTTP header that Firefox users can elect to send that tells ad networks they don’t want to be tracked.

To turn Do Not Track on in Firefox for Android, you tap on Browser Tools within the app. From the Preferences pane, you tap on the box next to “Tell sites not to track me” to turn this option on or off, where you can also choose to save passwords and allow cookies. The same feature was also launched for Firefox’s web browser in February.

This week the FTC called for ‘Do No Track’ technology to be added to mobile browsers, as more consumers use their smartphone’s browser to surf the web. Now that Firefox has added this feature to its mobile browser, it’s expected that others will follow suit.

 We’re hearing rumors that Twitter CTO Greg Pass has as of today left his post at Twitter, according to a source familiar with the company.

Prior to becoming CTO, Pass held the VP of Engineering position at Twitter, after being CTO and co-founder at Summize, which was acquired by Twitter in July 2008 and was eventually turned into Twitter Search. Prior to Summize, Pass was Systems Architect at AOL.

As VP of Engineering, Pass was responsible for taking the Twitter development team from a dozen engineers to around 10 times that number and played a seminal role in Twitter’s scaling success.

I’ve contacted Twitter PR for more information and have yet to hear back. I’ve also heard no word on who will be replacing Pass or what Pass’ future plans are.

Update: Twitter co-founder Biz Stone has confirmed that Pass will be leaving, with the below tweet. PR Representative Sean Garrett says that Twitter is not looking for a replacement and that Greg Pass currently has no future plans set in stone.

@biz
Biz Stone

Twitter acquired Summize three years ago, cofounder @gregpass is moving on—we're lucky to have had him so long!

May 20, 2011 2:02 pm via Twitter for MacReplyRetweetFavorite

Loopt a checkin app that seems to be pulling out all the stops in order to survive in a saturated space, has now partnered up with Groupon Now! in Chicago in order to provide Loopt users with locationally relevant realtime deals around them, push notifying them when they are near a deal.

While the plan is to notify users of deals when the app isn’t even open, and the time sensitive Groupon Now! deals will also appear on place pages within Loopt, so users can see and share with friends their favorite relevant deals in the vicinity.

Loopt has basically beat Groupon to bringing this LBS/realtime technology to its own app, where you still have to type in your zip code to get more granular locational deal notifications. But Groupon recently acquired Pelago, so I wouldn’t be surprised if a similar functionality is on its way.

Currently the specific Loopt service is only available in Chicago, and users who are interested can go into their Loopt settings, turn Reward Alerts on and start receiving their once a day, location specific Groupon Now! deal well, now!.

As 14% of subscribers interact with daily deal push notifications, this is a mutually beneficial and strategic partnership between the two companies. But one can help but wonder when Groupon will apply this same technology to its own mobile app and what exactly that will mean for Loopt long term.

Loopt is planning on expanding the Groupon Now feature nationwide, and it should be available on both Android and iPhones in each market.