Category: Tech news

In honor of the passing of Nicolas Hayek, CEO of the Swatch Group, we decided to wax a little nostalgic about his most breathtaking – and lucrative – product: the Swatch watch.

Swatch was the brainchild of Elmar Mock and Jacques Müller, two engineers who were attempting to make the thinnest wristwatch in the world. Instead, they created a simple plastic quartz watch with a movement that contained only about sixty pieces instead of the 100 plus found in Japanese quartz movements at the time. Hayek saw this as an excellent opportunity to create a “throwaway” watch that could be worn for a season and then swapped with another model. Artists and designers bedecked the watches in odd patterns and the company brought the nascent Swatch Group, formed by Hayek in the early 1980s, to the forefront of Swiss watch manufacturing.

At $20 or so, these watches were amazingly cheap and many collectors bought two at a time, one to wear and one to keep hidden away. The watches married high tech with high design and, given their fashion-forward nature, are the precursors to many of the design decisions made today by CE manufacturers. The iPod as an object of desire couldn’t have existed without the Swatch paving the way for inexpensive but highly designed objects to woo the consumer into regular upgrades.

Here are ten of our favorite Swatch innovations:

Read more…

Finally, there is now a Kindle reader for Android phones. Amazon wants to sell electronic books across multiple mobile devices, and currently supports its own Kindle readers, iPhone, iPad, IPod Touch, Blackberries, PC and Mac computers via a desktop client, and now Android.

You can read any of the 620,000 books available on the Kindle in the Android reader, and sync your bookmarks and library across other devices so you can pick up where you left off on your laptop or Kindle reader. Compared to other Android apps, the Kindle is a winner and will likely become extremely popular on the platform. It promises to turn any Android tablet into a serious e-reader

But compared to the latest version of Kindle for the iPhone and IPad, which just came out last night, it lacks a couple key features: namely support for audio and video playback. The Video Kindle, as I like to call it, is only available on the iPad/iPhone.

The Android Kindle also a couple other major features. There is no full-text search, and you cannot buy books from within the app. Instead it kicks you to the Web store where you have to purchase via the mobile browser. Both of those deficiencies will be fixed soon, promises Amazon. No word on whether the Android version will support audio or video playback.

It is pretty clear which platform Amazon is putting its resources into first. (Hint: It is not the Kindle device and it is not Android).

In 2008 Time Magazine really liked TechCrunch and yours truly, putting me on the Time 100 list of the most influential people in the world. I was on the verge of becoming a “cybermogul!”

But things went downhill from there. In 2009 TechCrunch was no longer relevant to, well, anything. TechCrunch was named one of the most overrated blogs. “Stick a fork in this one — it’s done,” said Time. Ouch.

But we’re back, baby! Despite absolutely zero editorial or other changes after our 2009 death, 2010 is a new year, and Time loves us once again. We’re one of their essential blogs:

Michael Arrington may be as cocky as ever, but it’s with good reason: his tech blog remains the essential destination for the inside scoop and analysis on what’s going on in Silicon Valley and beyond. Arrington and his team of bloggers have enviable access, getting exclusives and access from Apple to Zynga. Plus, for those in search of the next big thing, no one covers startups better than the Techcrunch gang. (And fosters them now, too — the blog’s Techcrunch Disrupt conference this year brought together some of the smartest minds in tech to look at some of the best up-and-coming new ideas.)

I’m pretty sure I know what’s coming in 2011: she loves me not, and another breakup. And I’m sad about that. But 2012 is going to be a good year, methinks. I’ve heard Time has already written the blurb about our big comeback from the 2011 flatline.

Google’s director of engineering Matthew Papakipos is leaving the search giant for Facebook, according to a Tweet he just sent out.

Most recently, Papakipos started and led the Chrome OS project at Google. Papakipos also served as the Director of the HTML 5 Open Web Platform for Chrome OS and created and lead the Chrome GPU hardware project.. Prior to joining Google, he was the CTO and VP of Engineering for software development company PeakStream, which was acquired by Google in 2007.

It’s certainly a talent loss for Google, which scheduled to launch Chrome OS in the Fall, and a huge talent win for Facebook’s engineering team. Facebook isn’t giving specifics on what Papakipos will be working on, but a representative did say that he would be a key player on the engineering team.

Here’s the official statement from Facebook:

Matthew Papakipos has indeed joined Facebook. Matthew is an accomplished entrepreneur and engineer, and it’s wonderful that he has decided to bring his considerable talents to Facebook’s world-class engineering team.

Facebook has also made another key engineering hire today, Jocelyn Goldfein, who was formerly a VP and general manager of VMware’s desktop business unit. Facebook said in a statement, “We’ve landed two accomplished, senior people to join the Facebook engineering team — Matthew Papakipos and Jocelyn Goldfein. Both are about as accomplished as they come and we can’t wait for them to hit the ground running as key players on the team.”

Facebook also recently snagged Google’s senior Android Developer Eric Tseng to head up mobile products for the social network.

Online humor site JibJab, which is behind ElfYourself and loads of other zany videos has hit a big milestone: it’s now processing one million paid transactions per year. That’s big news for the company, which pivoted in late 2007 from an ad-supported business to one that generates revenue primarily through premium services and downloads.

JibJab earns money through a few channels. First, it offers a premium membership for $12/year that gives members access to its full range of customizable “Starring You” videos, which let you insert your friends’ faces into funny video clips like the site’s amazing take on the original Star Wars Trilogy . Membership also gives you access to all Ecards and ‘Everyday Fun’ messages. Unpaid users have access to some of this content, but much of it is reserved for premium members.

If users want to download their custom videos they can do that too for a few dollars (premium members get a discount on downloaded goods). Finally, the site also sells physical goods emblazoned with photos of you and your friends.

CEO Gregg Spiridellis declined to break down how many transactions each of these revenue streams accounted for, but he did say that the site is seeing 2x growth in terms of premium transactions since last year. You can see Spiridellis talk more about this in the interview above. JibJab has raised $16.9 million since 2006.

Oh, AT&T.

I’ve already made my feelings on their MicroCell abundantly clear. Considering the quality of the carrier’s network in cities like San Francisco (which is to say, awful), it’s a good idea. But given the poor state of AT&T’s performance, they should be giving away the device for free to customers affected. Instead, they’re making those customers pay an extra $150 for the “privilege” of having working service. It’s a truly remarkable business model. Let’s call it: bait & switch & fix (for a fee). And it’s working.

AT&T managed to rope in two of the biggest name in tech into their scheme: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff. So that’s great for AT&T, right? Two huge potential endorsers of their rip-off box. Well, not so fast — this is AT&T, after all.

Benioff posted about his new MicroCell purchase on his Facebook wall yesterday. “I hope my iPhone will work at home now,” he wrote. This is undoubtedly the reason the vast majority of users have bought the device (instead of just, you know, leaving AT&T like regular people would do if their service doesn’t work). A lot of commenters on his post were curious to know how well it’s working as they suffer from the poor AT&T service as well. So how is it working? Well, according to the tech giants, it’s a mixed bag.

“I got one and it seems to work pretty well,” Zuckerberg wrote in a comment under Benioff’s post. “Pretty well” isn’t exactly a rave review, but AT&T will undoubtedly take it from Zuckerberg. But Benioff had a different experience. “Bought 2 AT&T MicroCells today. Installation won’t complete. Called AT&T. They said they are having a national MicroCell outage since Friday. It won’t work for 2 more days. Where is TrustAtt.com when you need it?,” Benioff wrote on his wall. Other posts confirm AT&T acknowledging the outage.

It’s another genius plan from AT&T. The network won’t work to make calls, so they get you to spend an additional $150 (on top of the $100+ a month you’re already spending with them for service), then that goes down, but only those wealthy enough to pay for landlines or other cellular phones on other networks (Benioff) are even able to call and complain. If both AT&T and their MicroCell service go down across the country, but no one can make a call to complain about it, did it really happen?

In all seriousness, this is pathetic. And besides Zuckerberg and Benioff, reports across the country seem to be a mixed bag about the MicroCell. Some say it works, some say it doesn’t (even when the network is up). We can’t confirm either of these scenarios because AT&T won’t even sell us one.

With the iPhone 4 selling 1.7 million units in the first three days, a whole new group of people are about to be exposed to the pleasure of AT&T. Hope they have $150 ready when/if that MicroCell network comes back up.

Yep, you read that right. Today W3i is announcing Apperang, a new service that will pay users to download mobile applications.

Apperang builds on the pay-per-acquisition model that we’ve seen succeed with companies like TapJoy. As opposed to pay-per-click, pay-per-acquisition (or pay-per-action) means that the developer only pays if the desired action occurs. In this case, developers pay only when the user downloads the app.

Hit the jump to find out how Apperang works.

Google has made it fairly clear that adoption of Google Apps at schools and colleges is vital to the growth of the productivity suite as a whole. The strategy makes sense; not only do educational institutions represent a huge market for Google Apps, but schools and colleges are where many people get trained, start relying on, and form brand allegiances to productivity apps. Today, Google is announcing that it has signed on two more states, Colorado and Iowa, to extend Google Apps for Education to the 3,000 schools across the two states.

The two states join Oregon, which was the first state to adopt Google Apps for Education in its schools. One of the advantages of “going” Google is the productivity suite’s attractive price point for public schools that are on a budget.

Another day, another iSuppli teardown. The folks at iSuppli have found that iPhone 4, according to their estimates, cost $188 to make. While this is almost comically low, it says something about Apple’s ability to mass produce phones and the high margins they’re able to make on relatively low-cost products.

The gyroscope chip, for example, apparently costs Apple $2.60 while it costs $2.90 in quantities of 200,000. These disparities pop up in a number of places, which, sadly, lends an air of WTF to the proceedings.

Read more…

It seems interest in the development of electric cars has really picked up steam in recent months, especially in Japan. A research team at Tokyo-based Waseda University has manufactured the ULV [JP], a one-person electric vehicle with a number of selling points: it’s cheap, it’s small and light (72.6kg), and it has a decent driving range (80km).

Read more…

Facebook recently announced it would be opening an office in Hyderabad, India, to be able to provide better round-the-clock and multilingual support to its ever-increasing number of users, advertisers and third-party developers.

According to Business Standard and India Times, the company is set to launch its India operations from the ‘City of Pearls’ – its first office in Asia – within the next two months.

In a press release on Sunday, the State Information Technology and Communications department said Facebook had been granted permission by the government to set up an office in a business incubator at the Raheja Mindspace special economic zone (SEZ).

The new office will add to Facebook’s operations in Palo Alto (California), Dublin (Ireland) and a recently opened office in Austin (Texas).

According to The Economic Times, an Indian government official also said that Facebook has been allotted about 50,000 sq ft space and is going to recruit close to 500 people for running its operations. Facebook, which has nearly 8 million users in India and nearly 500 million users across the globe, would reportedly invest $150 million in the initial phases.

Apprupt, an affiliate network for mobile apps, has today launched its self-service platform for “appvertisers” (a slightly silly name).

It enables app developers to sign up to apprupt on a cost-per-install basis, enabling them to track their marketing campaigns for both paid and free apps. Features include account management (including campaign spend), and reports and analytics providing “the ability to determine the ROI at any given time” by measuring the number of app downloads generated.

Affiliate marketing platform Skimlinks has launched its latest product that aims to make it even easier for publishers to place revenue generating affiliate links in their content.

Dubbed SkimWords, the feature, which is currently in beta, differs slightly from the company’s main offering. Rather than simply converting existing retailer links to affiliate links on-the-fly, it looks at the page’s content and converts any references to known products into fairly non-obtrusive geo-targeted links to retailer sites where the item can be purchased.

The fact that these links are location-aware – at the country level – is perhaps noteworthy since it accommodates a site’s international traffic and therefore hopefully doesn’t leave much money on the table.

Exclusive – Mobile application developer Geodelic has raised $7 million in a Series B financing round led by MK Capital, with previous backers Clearstone Venture Partners and Shasta Ventures participating.

The round brings the total amount of capital injected into the company to more than $10 million.

Initially incubated by Clearstone in 2008, Geodelic develops a free application for mobile phones that come with ‘search-less search’, meaning the app automatically browses and shows your points of interests in your immediate vicinity. The company was founded by Rahul Sonnad, who previously founded thePlatform, a Web video publishing service he sold to Comcast back in 2006.

The Geodelic app, which is available for iPhone and Android, lets you swipe through locations to quickly find a good coffee joint, closest bank, grocery store or favorite restaurant.

The application is also capable of learning what you seem to like, presenting you results based on your profile. Users get the added benefit of Geodelic’s integration with select reservation and review services (e.g. OpenTable).

The Geodelic network also contains content-specific mobile guides, which can soon be created by anyone. One example is the Hollywood Walk of Fame, which enables users to discover the attraction, locate their favorite stars of stage and screen and to access photos and biographies straight from the app.

Additionally, Geodelic technology has been licensed by carriers such as Korea Telecom to allow enterprise customers to quickly deploy mobile guides and to interact with their consumer base.

Geodelic’s makes money by partnering with brands and marketers to create a network of so-called Experiences. The startup’s authoring system allows businesses to publish location-triggered content to Geodelic users on the fly and provides detailed, real-time statistics they can use to improve their location-based offerings. A relevance engine even tracks user behavior, allowing marketers to reach consumers as efficiently as possible at the point of sale.

To date, the Geodelic application has been downloaded over half a million times on Android phones, the company says. It is also available for iPhone (iTunes link), and currently in development for Blackberry devices.

One day before its scheduled IPO, Tesla Motors is increasing the allotment of shares that will be sold to the public from 11.1 million to 13.3 million, according to an amendment to its S1 filing. The additional shares are being sold by existing shareholders looking to cash out at the IPO, including Tesla founder and CEO Elon Musk who is selling an additional 909,212 of his personal shares. Other selling stockholders include VantagePoint Venture Partners (238,748 shares), Bay Area Equity Fund (88,586), Westly Capital Partners (72,625), Compass Venture Partners (22,931), as well as friends and family like Elon’s brother (and OneRiot CEO) Kimball Musk (12,692). Tesla itself won’t make any additional money from the bump in shares, but more shares will be available to the public.

If Tesla shares open at the high end of its expected range of $14 to $16, the Silicon Valley electric car company will debut with a $1.5 billion market cap (based on 93.5 million total shares outstanding after the IPO and a concurrent $50 million private placement with Toyota). After the offering, Tesla’s largest shareholder will still be founder Elon Musk, who will own 28.4 percent of the company (worth $426 million at that valuation, versus a potential windfall of $14.5 million for the shares he is selling). The second largest shareholder will be Daimler (through an investment arm called Blackstar Investco) with 8 percent of the shares, and the third largest will be the government of Abu Dhabi (through Al Wahada Capital Investment) with 7.8 percent of the shares. The two biggest VC shareholders will be Vantage Capital Partners with 6.6 percent and Valor Equity Partners with 5.25 percent.

It takes a ton of money to crack into the car business. Even before the IPO proceeds, Tesla has already raised $783 million in venture capital and government loans. Tesla is expecting to raise about $210 million in the IPO, bringing the total raised to just over $1 billion.

And so far the company isn’t making any money. Last year, Tesla lost $56 million on revenues of $112 million. In the March quarter of 2010, it lost $29.5 million on revenues of $20.8 million. As of March 31, 2010, the company still had $188 million in cash. But it expects to spend up to $125 million this year, as it gears up to manufacture its Model S sedan (including $42 million to buy a factory in Fremont, California formerly operated by Toyota and GM).

While Tesla is known for its sexy roadster, it the Model S which will make or break the company. It is a more affordable electric sedan which the company hopes will start to make inroads with the general car-buying public.