Category: Tech news

The idea behind Grubwithus is an awesome yet simple one. You browse for a restaurant you’d like to go to in a certain city and buy a ticket for your meal at a set price. But the key is that others do this as well, all with the intention of meeting new people over dinner. And when you’re buying your ticket, you can see who your dinner buddies will be. Yes, it’s sort of like Groupon meets Meetup. And yes, it’s brilliant.

So it should be no surprise that a long list of prominent early-stage investors have decided they’d love to back Grubwithus. The service, which launched out of Y Combinator last year, has just raised a $1.6 million round. Who’s at the funding table? Andreessen Horowitz, First Round Capital, NEA, SV Angel, Ashton Kutcher, Guy Oseary, Vivi Nevo, Yuri Milner, Maynard Webb, Matt Cutts, Elad Gil, Paul Buchheit, Alexis Ohanian, Start Fund, and Y Combinator.

Alongside the funding, the company is also highlighting two different types of dinners: charity dinners and raffle dinners. And the first two they’re doing are with investors Andreessen Horowitz and NEA.

For the Andreessen Horowitz meal, which takes place a Tamarine in Palo Alto on May 18, you’ll have to bid to win a dinner with John O’Farrell and Scott Weiss (two of the general partners). The proceeds from the bidding will go towards Second Harvest Food Bank. The 10 highest bids will win seats at the table (and the bidding will close 24 hours before the event).

The NEA meal is a raffle one. Essentially, anytime you book a meal on Grubwithus you’ll get a ticket. These tickets can then be used to enter to win access to the NEA meal — the more tickets you have, the better chance you have of winning the random draw. If you do win, you’ll be asked to pay the $35 set fee for the meal at Reposado in Palo Alto.

Currently, Grubwithus operates in Chicago, San Francisco, New York, DC, and Los Angeles. Boston and Seattle will be opening very soon, co-founder Eddy Lu tells us. The biggest city remains Chicago, as that’s where the service first started, he says.

The team is currently 8 people, but with the new funding they’ll be looking to hire quickly. And they’ll need to, as Lu realizes the competitors and clones will come quickly. One such competitor is LetsLunch, which launched in January.

Lu also envisions expanding the idea of Grubwithus into other verticals and use cases.

That makes sense given the obvious business model. Grubwithus has actually been making revenues since day one, Lu notes. They take a percentage from the restaurants they work with.

“Restaurants love us because we want to create sustainable relationships with them and tell them to make sure they still make money using us,” he says. “Users also use Grubwithus for social utility, not financial utility, so it’s a bunch of high-quality users coming into these restaurants, not deal-hunting cheapskates,” he continues.

You can probably guess which services he’s alluding to with those statements.

Brands may be pouring money back into online display advertising, but that doesn’t mean that display advertising works or won’t be replaced by something else in the next few years. Will it be social, mobile, or something else? At TechCrunch Disrupt NYC, we’ll get into this debate with three of the best operators in online advertising: Facebook’s new VP of Global Advertising Carolyn Everson, Medialets CEO Eric Litman, and Right Media founder Mike Walrath.

Media companies and brands still don’t understand the power of social advertising, and Everson is going to explain it to them. She left Microsoft in February to join Facebook, and before that was head of sales at MTV Networks. Social ads are more about getting consumers to share a brand’s message on their own—turning consumers into brand ambassadors—than pushing the message in front of as many eyeballs as possible. Call it social targeting.

As computing goes mobile, that changes the prospects for brand advertising as well. On the one hand, tablets offer a more magazine-like experience for both content and ads. But beyond that, they bring location into the mix, which may turn out to be the most important targeting factor of all. Medialets powers the ads on many tablet publications, including The Daily, and is built into Adobe’s creative suite. Litman is taking on Apple’s own iAds on the iPad, and winning. He will explain how he does that.

Walrath was instrumental in making ad buying more efficient by creating an exchange for display ads with Right Media, which he sold to Yahoo for $850 million. But now he thinks that measuring clicks and impressions is the wrong focus for brands. His new startup, Moat, is trying to address that deficiency. Until it does, online display is going to have a tough time taking away advertising budgets from TV, which he think is still a pipe dream.

You can read the full list of announced speakers here. We have many more special guests to announce as May 23rd comes closer. If you haven’t purchased your tickets yet, make sure you do so here. If you are coming with us, we have a couple of great partnerships in place to help you find the perfect New York accommodations. We’ve partnered with Oyster.com who is providing a Disrupt hotel reservation list, plus your very own Disrupt Concierge Service for all Disrupt conference attendees. Oyster.com is also giving an additional 20% off room rates. You can read all about it here.

If you’d like to become a part of the Disrupt experience and learn about sponsorship opportunities, please contact Jeanne Logozzo or Heather Harde for more information.

Carolyn Everson
VP of Global Advertising Sales, Facebook

Carolyn Everson is the Vice President of Global Advertising Sales at Facebook, where she leads the global advertising team focused on top strategic accounts and global agencies. In addition, she oversees media strategy, advertising sales, and account management. Prior to Facebook, Carolyn was the Corporate Vice President of Microsoft’s Global Advertising Sales and Trade Marketing Teams. Carolyn led the company’s advertising business across Bing, MSN, Windows Live, Mobile, Gaming, Atlas and the Microsoft Media Network. Carolyn spent seven years at MTV Networks. Her last role was as Chief Operating Officer and Executive Vice President of U.S. Ad Sales for MTV Networks where she oversaw strategic planning, operations and finance for MTVN’s U.S. Ad Sales department. She also was responsible for MTVN’s Direct Response business and the cross platform, cross brand strategic sales and marketing group called Generator. Carolyn has also worked at Primedia Inc., where she was Vice President and General Manager of several digital businesses, and held business development positions at brands including Zagat Survey and Walt Disney Imagineering. She is a board member of the Effies and dmg. Carolyn holds a bachelor’s degree in liberal arts and communications from Villanova University where she graduated Summa Cum Laude. She also obtained a master’s degree in business administration from Harvard where she was a Baker Scholar.

Eric Litman
Charmain and CEO, Medialets

Eric Litman is Chairman and CEO of Medialets, the most widely deployed rich media ad platform for mobile. He is a pioneer of the Internet’s commercialization, and as a co-founder of Proxicom, helped to build one of the first, largest, and most successful publicly traded interactive agencies. Eric most recently served as Managing Director of WashingtonVC, an early-stage fund and incubator. Previously, Eric held senior executive roles in high-growth Internet businesses, as founder and CEO of Viaduct Technologies, a global Internet and mobile interactive agency. He was also instrumental in building digitalNATION, a web hosting and services provider, from its launch through its $100m acquisition by Verio Internet/NTT (NYSE: NTT). Eric began his career with technical and software engineering positions at GEnie, a pre-Internet online service provider, and NeXT Computer.

Michael Walrath

Investor, Advisor and Founder of start up and expansion stage companies. Formerly Founder, President and CEO of Right Media Inc. Walrath founded Right Media, Inc., (formerly Right Media, LLC) in 2003. He served as CEO until the company’s July 2007 sale to Yahoo. He had a successful career at DoubleClick (and later MaxWorldwide) where he served as Director of direct marketing and Senior Vice President of strategy and development. In 2001, he was responsible for the creation of DoubleClick Direct, its direct marketing offering. He has been a Director of Meteor Games, LLC since December 15, 2010. He served as a Director of Interactive Advertising Bureau Inc. He was awarded the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur Of The Year® 2007. He holds a B.A. in English from the University of Richmond.

Ze Frank wants to send us all back to kindergarten. Star.me, Ze’s soon-to-be fully public startup, which raised $500,000 from star-struck investors including Gary Vaynerchuk and Ron Conway, is an attempt to reinvent the kindergarten’s star system of rewards.

As Ze told me when he came into the TechCrunchTV studio earlier this week, “stars are good.” They make us human, they allow us to display our emotions and become children again. But the funny thing about Ze is that, in building his new online kindergarten, he’s had to become an adult – fancying an idea, raising capital, developing a business model, leading a team. And, as he confessed to me, becoming the CEO of a funded startup hasn’t always been as easy as he first imagined when he founded Star.me.

This is the first part of my conversation with Ze. On Monday, he tells me why the future of play is a “hot thing.”

Ze rates startup entrepreneur Ze Frank

Ze on why we need (yet) another social startup

Ze on why we all need to go back to kindergarten

comScore’s mobile subscriber stats are in for the month and Android continues to top U.S. smartphone share over Apple and RIM. Additionally, during the three month average period ending March 2011, Samsung was top handset manufacturer overall with 24.5 percent market share. Google Android led among smartphone platforms with 34.7 percent market share.

The report shows that during the period, 234 million Americans ages 13 and older used mobile devices (this number remained steady from the previous month). But, in terms of smartphones, 72.5 million people in the U.S. owned smartphones during the three months ending in March 2011, up 15 percent from the preceding three-month period.

Device manufacturer Samsung ranked as the top OEM with 24.5 percent of U.S. mobile subscribers. LG ranked second with 20.9 percent share, followed by Motorola (15.8 percent) and RIM (8.4 percent). Apple continued to gain share following the launch of the Verizon iPhone earlier this year, up 1.1 percentage points to reach 7.9 percent of subscribers.

With respect to smartphone share Google Android grew 6 percentage points to a 34.7 percent market share, while RIM ranked second with 27.1 percent share. Apple grew 0.5 points to 25.5 percent share, followed by Microsoft (7.5 percent) and Palm (2.8 percent). Google’s share continues to grow after passing both iOS and RIM for smartphone share in February.

comScore also examines how mobile subscriber are using their phones and reported that in March 68.6 percent of U.S. mobile subscribers texted using their phone. Browsers were used by 38.6 percent of subscribers (up 2.2 percentage points), while downloaded applications were used by 37.3 percent (up 2.9 percentage points). Accessing of social networking sites or blogs increased 2.6 percentage points, representing 27.3 percent of mobile subscribers. And Playing games comprised 25.7 percent of the mobile audience, while listening to music represented 17.9 percent.

Popular commenting platform Disqus, which recently raised $10 million from North Bridge Venture Partners and Union Square Ventures, is adding support for a feature that’s both nifty and familiar: mentions within comments. It may not sound particularly sexy, but it could actually help foster better discussions in comment threads (more on that in a bit).

If you’ve ever mentioned someone on Twitter you’ll be right at home with Disqus’s implementation. Start typing a comment, then type the ‘@’ symbol whenever you’d like to tag someone — this could be a user who has left another message in the comment thread, or a user who hasn’t participated. The convention is very similar to the ‘@reply’ system popularized by Twitter, and a small overlay will pop up with autocompleted names drawn from both Twitter and Disqus. Tagged names appear with a gray box around them in the published comment, which looks nice.

But this isn’t just for show. Disqus will send the tagged user an email notification (if they have a Disqus account) or a Twitter @reply (if they don’t), informing them that they’ve just been mentioned in the comment thread. And that’s important — it gives you an easy way to invite someone to comment on a thread that you think they’ll be interested in or knowledgable about. Depending on how mentions are used, there may even be an expectation that the person tagged in a comment comes and leaves a reply of their own (in other words, you can call people out).

Facebook, which now competes directly with Disqus via its Comments social widget, will probably add its own version of tagging in the future (Facebook’s main site has offered name tagging since late 2009). Update: Livefyre, another competing comments system, has also offered mentions using your social graph for around six months now.

The U.S. solar industry is banding together to fend off an onslaught of global competition, and to lower the cost of manufacturing solar technology domestically. To make it happen, the newly formed U.S. Photovoltaic Manufacturing Consortium (PVMC) secured a $57.5 million federal grant from the Department of Energy Sunshot Initiative, along with financial commitments totaling $400 million from various state and corporate entities.

Today, the PVMC revealed (in an exclusive to TechCrunch) who its earliest members are, including cleantech businesses more often seen as competitors, not collaborators. The list, which follows at the end of this post, encompasses raw material suppliers, the makers of metrology, modules and other solar equipment, major universities, and high-tech research and development laboratories. They are focused on thin film, or copper-indium-gallium-selenide (CIGS) technology in particular.

Some thin film solar basics…

CIGS solar photovoltaics work by absorbing solar photons and converting part of that energy into electricity, or storing part of it in a chemical reaction. CIGS solar panels, unlike others, can be manufactured so that they’re flexible and comparatively lightweight, which means they can be incorporated into a variety of architectural designs and space-limited applications.

In the first quarter of 2011, according to research by the Cleantech Group, venture capitalists invested $641 million in 26 deals in U.S. solar companies. MiaSolé, a thin-film panel maker, closed the largest round in that period, $106 million from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Firelake Capital and VantagePoint Venture Partners.

PVMC members will share high-tech facilities and equipment, and academic resources at the U-Albany (in New York, image above) and the University of Central Florida.

It’s high-tech collaborative consumption.

Michael Fancher, an associate professor of nano-economics at U-Albany’s College of Nanoscale Science & Engineering, who helped set up the PVMC explained:

“As academic hosts, we help each company pursue and protect their own product development, and work in a collaborative way that lets them recoup part of their overhead.

You could easily have competitors with similar process steps who are making CIGS solar photovoltaics. They’d typically operate within a facility they own. They might have one proprietary tool for one part of their manufacturing process that they’re changing up, and testing out.

With this facility and consortium, if you have to demo how your company’s new process step performs in an integrated process flow, you can put your tool in a [manufacturing] line, then another tool. You run the line on each, then compare the results. One might deposit materials using thermal deposition. Another might use sputtering deposition. You can reconfigure the line to demo these, and see where thing improve. But you don’t have to go out, and build your company its own entire line.”

This concept is nothing new. Years ago, the Austin-founded, now Albany-based SEMATECH did for the chip industry what PVMC aims to do for solar. (Sematech helped fund and form the solar consortium.)

Is this enough to mainstream clean energy?

Cleantech investor Michael DeRosa, managing director at Element Partners, believes:

“Early stage tech development gets more attention from cleantech investors in the U.S. We don’t have enough big money invested in the types of things that really need massive deployment, and are ready for that today. The private sector is not investing nearly enough in clean energy— not even close given the magnitude of the opportunity, and the problem, especially in the last couple of years.

Part of this is because government regulation [favoring renewable energy] isn’t happening, and it isn’t likely to happen this year. We could see a bunch hedge funds that used to pull in millions continue to drop out. What’s going to fill that gap?

Certainly government grants and collaboration can help. In the whole history of cleantech investing, though — and you’ve heard this before— we’ve invested less than a handful of days of Exxon’s revenue. I’d like to see the next half billion spent on deployable technology that can put a dent in our foreign oil dependence, now.”

Element Partners’ investments range within the cleantech sector from a natural gas vehicle technology company, Agility Fuel Systems, to an electric vehicle manufacturer, Think Global AS, from solar and wind businesses (Petra Solar and Wasatch Wind) to companies that help coal and oil businesses generate more energy from existing resources, with lower impact to the environment.

And now, the list…

The following organizations have joined the PVMC so far:

Research & Development
· College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering (CNSE)
· SEMATECH
· IBM
· National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL)
· Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL)
· University of Central Florida (UCF)
· Benet Labs

Material Suppliers
· Indium
· Saint Gobain
· Momentive
· Mallinckrodt Baker
· Matheson TriGas

CIGS Solar Equipment
· Veeco Instruments
· Technic
· Precision Flow Technologies
· Spire
· Infinity Precision
· Schiller
· Ulvac
· Mustang Solar
· Newport

Metrology
· Solar Metrology
· FEI
· JA Woolam
· PDF

Module Producers & Integrators
· Magnolia Solar
· Global Solar
· Alteris
· EYP/energy
· CG Power
· Amelio Solar
· CH2M Hill
· solo Power

End-users
· National Grid
· New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA)

The story of tech is largely about adoption, and adoption often comes into focus in the wake of cultural events. Last Friday’s wedding of Prince William to Katharine Middleton was the epitome of an event, bringing together YouTube watchers, Facebookers, Flickrers, Twitterers and even Colorers in a mass collective online experience of the festivities.

Taking place at 11 am in London (4 am in SF) the wedding itself was live streamed 72 million times, to people watching in 188 countries. With the addition of rebroadcasts that day, the streams reached 101 million by the end of April 29th.

(In case you missed it you can still view the entire 3 hour and 37 minute long affair on YouTube or above.)

During the 10 second Royal kiss, the Royal YouTube Channel received 100K additional requests, at 10K requests a second. Unsurprisingly the top five countries watching the spectacle were the UK, the US, Italy, Germany and France.

The official Royal Wedding website was bombarded with traffic, and has seen around 37.7 million page views and 13.7 million unique visitors since its launch on March 2. The event has also spawned the already beloved memes Frowning Flower Girl, Cartwheeling Priest and Princess Beatrice’s Hat.

Princess Beatrice’s ridiculous hat has over 100K fans on Facebook, beating Aretha Franklin’s inauguration hat at 94K. But seriously, what were they both thinking?

Following our visit to Berkeley Bionics to talk with the team about their inspiring artificially intelligent, bionic devices, we were lucky enough to visit The Santa Clara Valley Medical Center (VMC) to speak with those involved in the clinical testing of this new technology as part of patient treatment.

Berkeley Bionics has been working in conjunction with VMC Chief of Spinal Cord & Orthopedic Rehabilitation Dr. Akshat Shah to bring eLEGS — the wearable, artificially intelligent exoskeleton that enables those suffering from paralysis to stand up and walk again — into patient care, treatment, and rehabilitation.

Along with the VMC Foundation, which is raising money to support the project, the team is fine-tuning the device and studying how patients interact with eLEGS to optimize patient treatment and human-tech cooperation. The project’s eventual goal is to integrate the device into program-wide patient rehab both at VMC and in medical programs across the country in an effort to eliminate the need for wheelchairs and give the millions of people suffering from spinal cord injuries, stroke, MS, and more, the chance to stand up and walk again.

Below you will find interviews with Dr. Shah, VMC Foundation Executive Director Christopher Wilder, as well as a demonstration of eLEGS in motion with Karen Trolan, who was left paralyzed after a plane crash, but is well into her treatment and learning to walk again thanks to eLEGS. It’s truly wonderful stuff.

Special thanks to Karen and all those who participated, as well as Ashley Pagan for the expert camera work and editing, and TCTV Producer Jon Orlin for being The Facilitator.

And don’t forget to check out the first part of the story — including demos and interviews from our trip to Berkeley Bionics — here.

Here is another chance for you to win a free ticket to this year’s Disrupt in NYC. Early bird tickets are no longer available, so this ticket is valued at around $3,000. This is one giveaway you don’t want to miss!

We have been announcing new guest speakers week after week. Arianna Huffington, Marissa Mayer, Ron Conway, Dennis Crowley, Charlie Rose and many, many more will be joining us. You can read the full list of speakers as of now here. We still have surprises to announce, so be sure to be on the lookout for those.

Disrupt NYC is from May 23rd to May 25th and this ticket is good for the entire conference, as well as the after parties. Want it? Just follow the steps below to enter.

1) Like our TechCrunch Facebook Page:

2) Then do one of the following:

– Retweet this post (including the #TechCrunch hashtag)
– Or leave us a comment below

The contest starts now and ends tomorrow, May 7th at 7:30pm PST.

Please only tweet the message once or you will be disqualified. We will make sure you follow the steps above, choose at random, and contact the winner this weekend with more details. Anyone in the world is eligible.

Please note this giveaway is for 1 ticket only and does not include airfare or hotel. However, we do have a couple of partnerships in place to help you find a hotel. We’ve partnered with Oyster.com who is providing a Disrupt hotel reservation list, plus your very own Disrupt Concierge Service for all attendees. You can read all about it here.

Good luck and hope to see you there!

Netflix is leading the charge when it comes to streaming movies and TV shows over the Internet. It’s no longer focussed on DVDs, even though it is about to ship its 3 billionth disc. As bandwidth to the home increases, streaming will just continue to become more popular. At the Wired business conference earlier this week, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings predicted that gigabit-per-second speeds to the home will become common over the next decade.

I caught up with Hastings just before he went onstage and shot the video interview above (in which he does a mean impression of a 56K dial-up modem to illustrate how far we’ve come). “Streaming is the core of our business and it is growing rapidly.” he told me. “Streaming is much bigger than DVD for us in terms of hours of viewing, growth, and focus. We are seeing massive consumer adoption of streaming.” Not only that, but DVD growth might have peaked. Off camera, Hastings told me that DVD shipments for Netflix “this quarter may go the down first time ever.”

In this video, he also downplays the importance of Netflix licensing original programming (“it is no big strategy shift”) and explains why all you-can-eat subscriptions work so well for Netflix regardless of how people choose to watch their movies (DVDs, laptops, tablets, phones). He was a little too polite on-camera. But when I asked him what he thought about the New York Times’ multi-tiered paywall strategy in contrast to an all-you-can-eat subscription pricing, he responded: “If you are on the iPad and it has Safari and you go to the NyTimes.com and it works fine. Then you are asked to pay for the iPad app—that does not sound consumer friendly.” Exactly.

Comparison engine FindTheBest has announced a key hire today. Former Google and DoubleClick exec Rabin Yaghoubi will be joining the company as President. At FindTheBest, Rabin will lead Business Development, Marketing, Sales and Operations from the company’s newly opened New York office.

At Google, Yaghoubi helped launch and lead Google’s content, commerce and local partnerships. At DoubleClick Rabin was Vice President of Global Media, responsible for expanding and ultimately selling the company’s media business.

FindTheBest was founded by DoubleClick cofounder Kevin O’Connor so Yaghoubi and O’Conner go back to their DoubleClick days. The startup launched late last year, took funding by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers in December, and has been growing fast. The site now has 1.5 million monthly users, after only six months open to the public.

What makes FindTheBest unique is its ability to compare in-depth searches that crawl large amounts of data. For example, the engine is perfect for comparing colleges, allowing you to compare universities by acceptance rates, SAT scores, tuition, and more. As we wrote in our previous review, the quality of the data they’ve gathered from government and other trusted sources, the transparency into how the data is sourced, and the tools available to slice, dice and manipulate it make FindTheBest a compelling destination.

Software creator Janrain is bringing its social login SDK to Android phones today.

Janrain’s plug and play technology allows an app developer’s visitors to sign-in to the app with their existing accounts on Facebook, Google, Twitter, Yahoo, LinkedIn or other networks and then publish their comments, purchases, reviews or other activities from the app to multiple social networks.

Features of the Janrain Engage for Android SDK include social Login for 20-plus identity providers and social networks, social sharing to 5 networks, a built-in preview feature that displays how a social post would appear on the social network; and more. Janrain Engage will also remember an app user’s preferred network on return visits and will provide a single-click return experience.

Janrain Engage was extended to the iPhone last year, and the iPad earlier this year. Future releases will include email and SMS sharing as well as a tablet optimized version, says the company.

Customer support startup Zendesk is partnering with knowledge base company MindTouch today to offer a social help solution for customer service agents. Now support agents using Zendesk’s customer support SaaS, can query a MindTouch-powered knowledge base for quick answers. The idea is that customer support agents can share their knowledge base with other support agents to improve service to consumers.

The crowdsourcing functionality is allows for collaborative editing, content scoring, commenting, media and video. And support tickets sent to an end user can also be republished as knowledge base articles. Within the knowledge base platform, customer service agents can search by keyword and see what articles are getting viewed the most, which articles are support agents referencing the most and which articles are being edited the most.

The new offering also has “Google Analytics for your support knowledge base,” so both agents and managers can run reports on what problems are being most searched for, which articles have lots of material changes and/or confusion, which articles have the highest ratings or most comments, which articles or subjects are the most requested in terms of new info needed, which end users are contributing the most really helpful content, which agents are pushing changes most frequently, and more.

MindTouch’s social knowledge platform adds to Zendesk’s existing Twitter integration, which allows agents to turn a Tweet into a Zendesk ticket and respond publicly to a complaint on Twitter from Zendesk’s platform.

MindTouch has powered knowledge bases for companies like Paypal, Autodesk, The Washington Post, Mozilla, HTC, HP-Palm, and Intuit. Adding a knowledge base to a customer service support platform makes sense, so the offering is sure to be popular amongst Zendesk’s 10,000 customers.

Tablets and electronic book readers are on a collision course. In this episode of Fly or Die , ChrunchGear editor John Biggs and I discuss the pros and cons of the new BlackBerry Playbook and the Color Nook from Barnes & Noble. The PlayBook is fast and a solid effort from our much-beleaguered Canadian friends. But is it too little, too late?

If you are a BackBerry user and want a tablet that syncs to your phone, this could be for you. (In the video, Biggs keeps saying Android, but he means BlackBerry—too many Four Lokos before the taping). I actually like the PlayBook better than most Android tablets. But if it’s incredible apps that you want, the PlayBook’s choices are still pretty limited.

The Color Nook is a different story. It’s primary purpose is as a digital book reader and it’s main competition is the Kindle. But it is also a fully functioning color Android tablet. And just recently it added support for Android apps. So you can read books—including animated ones for your kids—browse the Web, and check out apps like Pulse and Pandora. Not bad for $250. Watch the video above to find out more, and check out past episodes here.

Ah, robots. When they’re not busy planning world domination, they apparently play Angry Birds just like the rest of us. OptoFidelity, a Finnish company that specializes in machine vision and optical measurement technology, in addition to other things I don’t understand, recently produced a physical robot that knows how to kill nasty green pigs.

It most certainly beats the crap out of this (OptoFidelity 1 – Stanford University 0).

OptoFidelity’s Hans Kuosmanen and Jere Tuulkari go into more detail in another video:

And for the techies, an excerpt from the forum post linked above (and a third video):

OptoFidelity, a National Instruments Alliance Partner, recently expanded from vision applications to building test systems. To create the robot that plays Angry Birds, Optofidelity engineers needed a real-time system and field-programmable gate array (FPGA). They used NI products, specifically NI CompactRIO, NI Single-Board RIO platforms, and NI LabVIEW software, because they were the best fit to meet the specifications required for this sweet app.

The application allows their customers to create their own driver without modifying the main software, ensuring compatibility with different display drivers. What’s more, this application isn’t restricted to just the Nokia handset in the video. It is an independent platform that will work with the display of most devices.

(Thanks for the heads up, Maegan Quejada!)