Category: Tech news

Product: Hot Pots

Manufacturer: Roundup:

Wired Rating: 0

People have been putting vessels over heat since the Neolithic period. It’s time for an upgrade. We tested some of the most modern electric kettles available to get you out of the Stone Age and steeped in the future.

1. Cuisinart PerfecTemp Cordless Programmable Kettle

Four minutes and nine seconds! That’s the average time it takes for Cuisinart’s electric teapot to boil a liter of water. In addition to this blistering performance, the PerfecTemp offers a host of other highlights: the widest range of preset temperatures (six options, from 160 degrees to boiling), an easily accessed control panel built into the handle, and the ability to keep water warm longer than any other kettle we tested (30 minutes).

WIRED Blazing fast. Baseplate is so streamlined you can’t tell it’s there when the teapot is on it. Manual contains a brief history of tea. Awwww.

TIRED Overshoots selected temperatures by an average of 3 degrees. (We survived.) Tough to get your hand inside for a good scrubbing.

$100, cuisinart.com

2. Breville Variable Temperature Kettle

Breville made a serious run for best in class with this fast, easy-to-use little number. The control panel on the base displays five levels of heat, ranging from 175 degrees (green tea) to a full-on boil (get your English breakfast here! ). And this thing is unmistakably high-end, with solid construction, illuminated buttons, and blue-green-tinted acrylic windows. But you pay a premium for all that: The Breville was the most expensive in our group.

WIRED Easy to clean, easy to use, easy on the eyes. Averaged 5:09 in our liter-boil event. Labeled buttons tell you which temperature suits which beverage. Gets within an average of 1.2 degrees of your selected setting.

TIRED Keep Warm function stays on for only 20 minutes. Large-ish footprint. Spendy.

$150, brevilleusa.com

3. Krups BW4000

If all you want to do is quickly boil a large quantity of water without mussing your minimalist decor, Krups’ die-cast kettle is a solid choice. Operation is dead simple—just hit the switch and wait. The bane side of that boon: You don’t get any of the advanced features you’ll find in similarly priced competitors.

WIRED Two-quart capacity is the largest in our group, while its 56-square-inch footprint saves space. Boils a liter of water in about five minutes—our silver medalist. Wide mouth makes it easy to get your hand inside come cleaning time.

TIRED The class pig at 4.1 pounds. Except for the soft clicking sound of the switch flipping itself off, there is no audible indication that your water has boiled. Pricey for a one-trick pony.

$100, krups.com

4. Chef’s Choice SmartKettle 688

With its homely looks, incessant beeping reminders, and ability to dial in any temperature from 122 degrees to 212, the SmartKettle is a bit of a nerd. True to form, it was also slow, taking last in our 1-liter boilathon. It averaged a tortoiselike six minutes, 25 seconds. But if you’re finicky about your tea temp and not in a hurry, the 688’s math-class precision may be worth waiting for.

WIRED Superlight: just a hair over 2 pounds. Hits specified temperatures to the degree. Speaks both Celsius and Fahrenheit.

TIRED Sloooooow. LED display never turns off. Won’t heat less than 16 ounces of water. Be prepared to scratch your hand when you stick it inside to clean the thing.

$100, chefschoice.com

Hyperlocal business directory MerchantCircle is getting into the content game today with the launch of a “Local Content Studio.” Merchant Circle, which has been steadily growing, is a business directory for merchants in smaller towns and currently lists 1.3 million small businesses. MerchantCircle has local business members in 95% of the 24,600 U.S. cities and towns with populations over 200.

The Local Content Studio aims to bring bring short-format information and articles that focus on the long tail of consumer local interest. The idea behind the studio is to create in-depth local content designed to connect customers with merchants. And MerchantCircle is encouraging business owners on its site to contribute the content. A typical submission would focus on “the best fishing tips for Five Lake, in Talkeetna, Alaska,” written by a local bait shop owner.

Similar to AOL’s local content factory Patch, writer or local merchants can submit content to be reviewed for approval or corrections, and published to local and topical “Expert Pages” on MerchantCircle. The studio was soft-launched in May and have already seen over 28,000 city descriptions and nearly 12,000 accompanying local photosets. It’s unclear how MerchantCircle is paying contributors (the assumption is according to page views) but the company claims that some writers have earned as much as $700 in one week.

It looks like MerchantCircle has been looking to other startups and companies for inspiration on how to drive more traffic to the platform. Most recently, the company launched a Mayorship feature, which is a take on Foursquare’s network. And clearly, MerchantCircle is adopting a content model similar to Demand Media or Patch. But the content play could work to the company’s favor. According to Compete, MerchantCircle’s traffic has increased since May to 8 million unique visitors in July. And MerchantCircle may be looking to increase traffic as it possible preps for an IPO in the coming year.

A Swiss startup offering mobile visual search and augmented reality technology, kooaba, landed about $3 million venture funding (from undisclosed Swiss investors) the company’s co-founder and chief executive Herbert Bay reported this morning.

Kooaba was spun out of the Computer Vision Lab at a top science and technology university in Switzerland, ETH Zurich.

The company’s mobile phone apps allow users to take a snapshot of print ads, DVD and book covers, movie posters and physical goods, to derive product information, best available prices, and possibly coupons or associated digital extras.

It plans to use this capital to enter into new geographical markets, and pursue partnerships with other companies in the visual search and augmented reality space like Layar and metaio.

The company’s image recognition API debuted in March.

Mobile applications discovery and sharing service provider Appsfire is going social, henceforth enabling users to connect to Facebook in order to bring their Facebook friends in on the fun.

Basically, this allows Appsfire users to easily add their iPhone app collections and share them with their existing social graph, rather than forcing users to build a new one from scratch.

The venture-backed startup has also released some strong figures to back up their reason for being, but more on that below.

Up until today, Appsfire already enabled users to easily import all their apps into the service, using either automatic synchronization or by manually putting together lists of their favorite applications. Users get a vanity URL to share their up-to-date app collection (see myap.ps/bradfeld for an example).

Now that you can sign up to Appsfire using Facebook Connect, the idea is that recommendations and discovery of new apps will be even more relevant to users, provided their friends have similar tastes.

Appsfire says it will include support for more social networks in the future.

They’ve also gotten an official Facebook endorsement for their work, from the company’s Head of International Business Development Christian Hernandez:

“Appsfire leverages the Facebook platform in an innovative way to enable the social discovery of mobile applications. Application developers are seeking to drive distribution, and users are seeking to find new and compelling applications.

We are convinced that the ability to discover applications based on what that your Facebook friends have installed on their device , will spur on a new vibrancy in the mobile developer ecosystem.”

AppsFire today also released an app ranking mechanism based on Facebook that updates in real time. The ranking is not so much a popularity one based on number of downloads, but banks on worldwide Facebook activity (likes, comments, shares, etc.) to determine which applications are hot.

The startup essentially scans the public Facebook feed for app URLs of any type and queries for number of likes, shares and comments from users. Appsfire is careful enough to filter what it calls ‘biased activity’ from apps that have naturally embedded Facebook sharing into their system (e.g. photo sharing apps).

For each app, the level of activity is rendered, a top 20 list is cooked up, and the rankings are updated every hour. Appsfire says about 1,000 iPhone apps are discussed on Facebook at any given day, which strikes me as fairly low to be frank.

The startup recently launched a new product called AppTrends, which essentially delivers near real-time rankings of iPhone apps based on the chatter on Twitter.

Since its emergence in January 2010 (the actual launch of the platform was in March this year), Appsfire has grown a lot. Currently, the startup says it is generating a whopping 1.5 million clicks per month to developers’ pages on the App Store, up 4x since its launch four months ago. These clicks result in preview pages, but ultimately lead to a lot of actual app downloads, the company claims.

AppsFire recently released AppStream for iPad (a dynamic wall of real-time clicked apps), which – quite unexpectedly – became the #2 Free App in the US (and top 10 in most countries) with over 1/4 million downloads and over 80,000 sessions per day.

Finally, the company says revenue from affiliate fees and paid placements is coming in nicely, and expects to turn cash-flow positive by the end of this year.

Straight from the Benjamin Franklin department of “waste not, want not” comes upstart AfterDownload with a simple idea about how to enhance those typical download and ecommerce ‘Thank You’ pages … use them to promote more wares.

Good ol’ Ben would surely ask: ‘Why let them go to waste when you can squeeze them for some additional revenue? Am I right, or am I right?’

AfterDownload delivers a convincing pitch: for publishers, the benefit is obvious, as they get to monetize exit traffic with practically zero effort.

Advertisers, which are strictly software vendors, benefit from pay-for-performance (predominantly CPC) so they really have nothing to lose. Users aren’t really hurt along the way, seeing all they are exposed with is yet another ad – no biggie, right?

Under the hood, AfterDownload is a self-serve ad network with all the basic ad-server features you would expect: geo and browser-targeting, reporting, etc.

Currently averaging 15 million impressions a day, I have a feeling Ben would approve.

Want to stream Netflix shows and TV on a tiny screen? Well now you can. The Netflix iPhone app is now available on iTunes and it offers the same functionality you know and love on the iPad but on the smaller devices.

No huge changes here: you sign-in, pick a video, and start watching over wi-fi or 3G, with obvious quality reduction with bad reception. Click through for the press release.

Read more…

As more businesses look to social media for marketing efforts and to drive sales, there is a need for a comprehensive, yet easy to use platform to manage interactions on social networks. Chicago-based startup Sprout Social is launching its social relationship management platform to the public today.

The startup’s platform allows businesses to connect to customers and monitor key metrics and the overall competitive landscape using social media tools. The Sprout Social platform integrates with social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, LinkedIn and Foursquare and includes lead generation, business intelligence, offer and promotion distribution services, as well as brand monitoring and analytics.

Sprout Social, which has been in private beta for the past few months, allows users to manage promotions, contacts and even target new users on social networks. For example, the platform will integrated with Foursquare, showing a business who is checking in the most at a certain venue, which customers are first-time visitors, and more. While in private beta, Sprout Social has over 2000 users of the platform, including social media friendly pizza business Naked Pizza.

While the social CRM space is a crowed arena filled with a number of worthy competitors, including Hootsuite, Radian6 and more; Sprout Social is hoping that a low price point can help differentiate the platform. Sprout Social ranges from $9 to $49 per month. The company recently raised funding from investment firm Lightbank.

Granicus, a privately held San Francisco company that provides solutions for creating, managing and distributing live and on-demand streaming media content for government agencies, has acquired Webcasting.com for an undisclosed sum.

Granicus did say the company was able to complete the transaction using existing capital, and in a letter to Webcasting.com customers let it be known that chief executive Mike Pollock will not be joining them as part of the deal.

According to Pollock’s personal website, he’s instead going to focus all of his efforts on LiftTickets.com, a site that will partner with ski resorts across North America to offer discounted tickets to skiers online (see also Liftopia).

Pollock had acquired LiftTickets.com / SkiPasses.com the past winter, he writes.

Granicus says its acquisition of Webcasting.com adds more than 60 government agencies to its current client base, expands the company’s reach in several local government markets, and advances its government services portfolio.

Granicus claims that since its founding in 1999, it has helped over 700 government agencies stream more than 25 million webcasts over the Web. In that regard, buying Webcasting.com seems like a good fit, if only for branding purposes.

A week after purchasing Fortify, HP has made a purchase today, acquiring Stratavia, a database and data center automation company. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Stratavia develops and markets database, server and run book automation software which helps customers reduce the cost of operating their enterprise environments. The software is designed to control application deployment and management in hybrid IT environments as well as simplify the deployment of applications in the cloud.

Cisco this morning announced its intent to purchase privately-held and venture-backed ExtendMedia, a provider of software-based Content Management Systems that helps media companies and network operators manage digital video content.

Financial terms of the transaction remain undisclosed, and the deal is expected to close in the first half of Cisco’s fiscal year 2011.

Dell announced this morning that 3PAR has accepted its increased offer to acquire the storage company for $24.30 per share in cash, or approximately $1.6 billion, net of 3PAR’s cash.

Dell had previously signed an agreement to acquire 3PAR for $18 per share, with a provision for matching competing bids.

HP subsequently outbid Dell for the data storage company, offering $24 per share in cash, or also roughly $1.6 billion at the time. Dell and 3PAR have now signed an amendment to the agreement reflecting the new offer price, which brings its bid up to par with HP’s offer.

Here’s a summary of a series of articles I posted over at CrunchGear earlier this week. The occasion: as the first international blogger, I was guided through a special tour of Japanese telecommunications giant giant NTT‘s showroom NOTE [JP] in Tokyo (where I live) last week.

And I can confirm they do have some pretty cool tech. The showroom offers demonstrations for over a dozen of different “next-generation” technologies, but the videos I took focus on these four areas: telemedicine, digital signage, Home ICT, and remote collaboration (hit the links to go to the more detailed posts on CrunchGear).

Demo 1: Telemedicine

The advanced telemedicine solution NTT is showing at its showroom is currently being used by 19 institutions in Japan.

The difference between the telemedicine system set up in the showroom and those used outside is that the former can transfer video in high resolution. In the video embedded below, you can see how an NTT employee “performs” remote pathological diagnosis of cells through a monitor connected to a microscope that’s located in a hospital that doesn’t have a pathologist.

In the demo, the data transfer is being handled by NTT’s proprietary next-generation network (NGN), a high-performance optical fiber network launched in 2008.

Demo 2: Digital Signage

NTT has developed an “intelligent” digital signage system that not only detects the presence of human beings but also takes into account how many people are standing in front of it. For example, if two persons approach the display in the restaurant floor of a shopping mall, a camera installed in the ceiling right above the system immediately detects their presence.

But instead of randomly displaying ads, the system pulls information from restaurants in its network and offers up ads only for those that currently have enough space for two people. The system also detects if a person tries to walk away and reacts accordingly (“Wait, there’s more.”). It’s possible to get discount coupons on your mobile phone through the system, too.

The first video below shows the digital signage system itself, while the second highlights how it actually works:

Demo 3: Home ICT

Home ICT is another technology that makes use of NTT’s next-generation network. The idea here is to organize and control all devices and appliances people have in their houses through a cell phone, TV or other device via a single, unified “Home Gateway”.

Practical applications include energy management, remote health care solutions, entertainment (i.e. device agnostic, wire-/and cable-less and remote sharing of content), or or even crime and disaster prevention.

In the case of an earth quake, for example, users will be warned via a message on the TV screen while the system automatically cuts off all gas mains in the house. The system will even close the curtains for users.

Demo 4: Remote Collaboration Apparatus “t-Room”

The so-called remote collaboration apparatus “t-Room” is probably the demo with the biggest wow-factor. The t-Room is essentially a room that consists of multiple video screens and that’s connected to other t-Rooms to share audio and video content remotely (again, over NTT’s next-generation network).

The showroom has two t-Rooms to demonstrate how two or more people can interact with each other over shared video screens. Users see themselves (plus real or virtual objects) and the persons in the other t-room(s) at life-size and in real-time (it’s also possible to program a time lag).

The technology can be used for entertainment, remote education and collaboration, video conferencing, and other applications. Needless to say, all sessions can be recorded.

The main difference between the t-Room and conventional systems is that the t-room “overlaps” screens, removing (in a way) spatial barriers that separate users who are located far away from each other. And it looks much cooler, too (see the video I shot at the showroom below).

Many thanks to NTT Communications for organizing the NOTE tour.

Well, this is curious.

From our checks, it seems like Google has completely omitted Yelp reviews from Google Places. As you may recall, Yelp has been frustrated by Google’s recent decision to pump up its Places service with Yelp’s content— without Yelp’s consent.

During a recent interview with TechCrunch TV, Yelp’s CEO Jeremy Stoppelman said he was surprised by Google’s move but was confident that it was not a “permanent situation, from what we gather from talking to Google, they are sort of headed in a new direction that which hopefully will be more positive.”

It’s unclear whether this is the “positive” outcome Stoppelman was hoping for (we’ve reached out to Yelp and Google for confirmation and comment). The companies’ ambiguous “talks” seemed more complex than the simple inclusion or omission of Yelp’s data but Stoppelman did say that (prior to Google’s data grab) Yelp was content to be excluded from Places and confined to organic results.

File Google and Yelp’s relationship under “it’s complicated” (— and not just because Yelp walked away from a hefty takeover offer in late 2009).

Several years ago, Google paid Yelp for access to its treasure trove of user reviews, as the company developed the precursor to Google Places. Eventually the partnership fell apart and an unsatisfied Yelp walked away. It was a relatively peaceful coexistence until this summer, when Google unexpectedly started to crawl Yelp’s pages for unlicensed content to flesh out Google Places. As Stoppelman pointed out in our July interview, he was also annoyed to see Yelp’s reviews pushed to the bottom, while official partners, like Zagat, got top billing.

While it’s virtually impossible to check every page on Google Places to verify that all of Yelp’s reviews are now excluded, in a July 26 post, my colleague MG Siegler referenced a few sample pages (like this page on SF’s Gordo Taqueria or Pancho Villa) that were heavily reliant on Yelp’s content. Today, they are both stripped of that data.

Arbitrary checks in other cities yielded the same results.

It was strange (actually, downright eerie) to see pages that were once rich with Yelp’s reviews— now completely bereft of them.  Occasionally, when I was searching for a restaurant I would get a snippet of a Yelp review in the preview pane. However, once I clicked through to the restaurant’s page, the review was magically missing— as in the case of the 95th Restaurant in Chicago (and yes, I went through all 355 reviews available):

We’ll update once we hear back from Google/Yelp.

Here’s our July interview with Stoppelman, if you’re interested:

Just three months ago everyone was happy. Lithium Technologies, which has a suite of social CRM solutions, picked up Scout Labs for a reported (by us) $20 million. Minor Ventures, which incubated Scout Labs, was able to take a nice, if small, liquidity event.

Things aren’t so happy now.

In a lawsuit filed in San Francisco Superior Court, Minor Ventures accuses Lithium Technologies of intentional misrepresentation, fraud and fraudulent concealment. The Lithium Technologies stock Minor Ventures received in the transaction was only worth half of what Lithium Technologies supposedly promised it was worth. Like many lawsuits, it reads like a good novel:

The entire amount at stake is around $5.5 million (half of the promised $11 million or so in stock received). Minor Ventures is also asking for punitive damages as well. We’ve embedded the full complaint below.

We’ve reached out to Lithium Technologies for their side of the story and will update with any comments.