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At a media even in the Big Apple, Canon today announced its latest flagship photo printer, the Pixma Pro-1. According to Canon, the Pixma Pro-1 is the world’s first A3+ printer to boast 12 separate inks.

Along with Photo and Matte black inks, there are three grey inks — dark grey, grey, and light grey — and six color inks, including Cyan, Photo Cyan, Magenta, Photo Magenta, Yellow and Red. The printer also comes with a Chroma Optimizer, which is meant to add richness to blacks and add uniformity to glossiness.

Compared to older Pixma models, the Pixma Pro-1 sports 2.5x larger ink tanks to allow for less ink cartridge replacements. The printer features front-opening panels for easy access, and a rear paper tray which takes up to 20 sheets of photo paper. The manual feed slot can handle heavier artsy papers up to 14-inches wide.

Canon has also doubled its input resolution compared to previous models, with 1200 DPI. The printer will feature Canon’s Easy-PhotoPrint Pro software, which can work as its own tool or as a Photoshop plug-in.

The Pixma Pro-1 photo printer go for $999.

Last year, several lawsuits emerged that accused Yelp of extorting businesses to advertise in exchange for positive reviews. Yelp has just announced that a judge granted Yelp’s request to dismiss these suits.

For background, the lawsuits claimed that after declining a request to purchase advertising on Yelp, a number of positive reviews from businesses’ listings on the reviews site mysteriously disappeared, downgrading the company’s rating on the site.

In February of 2010, two law firms, Beck & Lee from Miami and The Weston Firm in San Diego, filed a class action lawsuit in Los Angeles federal court alleging unfair business practices by Yelp. And in 2009, the East Bay Express ran a story basically accusing Yelp of being in the ‘Business of Extortion 2.0′, which covered similar ground. Shortly after reporter Kathleen Richards published the article, Yelp vehemently denied everything and called her piece inaccurate.  A number of similar copy cat suits also emerged.

As CEO and founder Jeremy Stoppelman writes “our automated system applies the same objective criteria to all reviews regardless of a business’s advertiser status. (Just check a Yelp advertiser’s business page — I bet they have a negative review or two; after all, you just can’t please everyone all the time.)

Last year, Yelp made some adjustments to its review process. For example, Yelp removed a feature that allowed businesses that advertised with Yelp to place their favorite review above others. It also let users see reviews that have been removed by its (automated) “review filter,” which is designed to help prevent business owners from posting all too positive reviews of their own company or malicious reviews of competitors.

Yelp also established a Small Business Advisory Council’ whose members have provided the company’s management with “guidance and perspective regarding the concerns of small business owners”.

Stoppelman admits that there are flaws to the system, writing, Additionally, since protecting content integrity is a difficult task, our automated algorithm isn’t perfect: sometimes legitimate content can get caught. This is an unfortunate reality in an environment where some folks are determined to try to game the system, but it is a price we are willing to pay to protect consumers and remain a useful resource.

The dismissal of the lawsuits means that the plaintiffs can’t sue Yelp again. It’s surely a relief to have these allegations dismissed. Now Yelp can go back to focusing on its potential IPO in 2012.

Sorry RIM, but it looks like the promise of free apps and tech support weren’t enough to assuage the masses. According to the Financial Post, RIM is preparing to deal with a class action lawsuit filed on behalf of Canadian users affected by the company’s widespread service outage.

Filed in Quebec Superior Court by the Consumer Law Group, the complaint seeks compensation for all of RIM’s customers that “were unable to access their email, BlackBerry Messenger service (BBM), and/or Internet for the period of October 11 to 14, 2011.” RIM hasn’t received the complaint yet, but representatives have said that the company will “formally respond” to the matter soon.

The lawsuit’s lead complainant was an avid user who used his BlackBerry to communicate with his friends across the western hemisphere. According to the formula laid out in the complaint, he will only be able to collect $1.25 in damages from RIM — not much, but the payouts could quickly add up if the lawsuit picks up steam. The amount of damages owed is calculated on a person by person basis, and accounts for how long a customer was left without service, so some users will net more than others.

It’s tough to put a finger on how much RIM may have to shell out here, as the company has avoided offering estimates of how many customers were affected. Still, co-CEO Jim Balsillie called the outage the biggest in the company’s history in a recent conference call, so RIM could be looking at a sizable number customers itching for some restitution.

Then again, of all the places struck by the outage, North America seemed to be affected the least. RIM may be able to pay off a few thousand customers and move on, but considering their luck, I doubt things will go that smoothly.

Fans of legalese can find the full complaint reproduced below.

I unintentionally set off a nice little flame war last week when I criticized Samsung’s decision to go with a Pentile sub-pixel matrix for their new Galaxy Nexus phone, a display technology that doesn’t have an illustrious past and, while it may prove itself in this generation, still made me lose confidence in the phone. Sub-pixel layouts are something few people consider, but (as the Engineer Guy explains) all those pretty colors you see on your displays are almost always made up of a few tiny monochromatic dots. E-ink screens use one dot per pixel, but they are of course monochrome, and the Mirasol and Pixel Qi displays we’ve seen also use an RGB matrix. But research being done in Taiwan may combine the best of both worlds.

Wallen Mphepö, a researcher at National Chiao Tung University, has created a new kind of pixel that operates completely differently from existing technologies. The details are a bit scarce, as his research has not yet been published except as a summary in this article at the Economist (the image accompanying this article is just an illustration).

The way the new screens work is that each pixel, normally created by a set of sub-pixels, is instead a single mechanism: a 30-micron piece of zirconium oxide (you probably know it best as cubic zirconia) with a 1.23-micron layer of silver on top. But while you’d think the silver would act as the reflective layer, it in fact acts as the transmissive layer, allowing light to pass through and strike the ZrO₂. By tilting the whole pixel mechanism using a micro-electromechanical system, the wavelengths of light allowed to pass through in and out are changed. And Mr. Mphepö claims that each single pixel can produce a full optical palette, or close to it.

This means that using this new style of pixel would instantaneously triple pixel density, or conversely, reduce the transistors and mechanisms necessary to create a given resolution by two-thirds.

The new screens have not been demonstrated; indeed, it is not clear whether Mr. Mphepö has even been able to stick more than one of these micro-mirror pixels together. And as usual, research like this take ages to arrive in consumer hands. But if it does what it claims to do, there are many companies that would buy it in a heartbeat and fast-track it to market to compete with E-ink (which dominates passive displays) and provide a full-color, low-power alternative to LCD-based tablets.

If you’re waiting in the queue for Google’s Real Time Analytics Beta, we’ve got good news… and we’ve got bad news. The good news: Google has just let in another big round of participants, so odds aren’t too shabby that you’re in. The bad news: they mixed up their “To:” field and their “BCC:” field on the welcome e-mail.

We’re not going to post the list of addresses for obvious reasons — but all in all, I’m counting just shy of 500 addresses spilled. If you’re worried you’re in there somewhere, check your inbox for an e-mail titled “Welcome to the beta trial for Real-Time Analytics!”, then check the To: field for about 495 too many people.

It’s unclear if this is the entire list of folks finding their way into the Analytics Beta today, or if the e-mails were sent out in batches of around ~500 recipients each. If it’s the latter, hopefully this is the only one with the BCC slip-up.

Fortunately, the implications of mistakes like this usually aren’t too nasty. Everyone will get a few dozen e-mails as people jokingly reply-all with pictures of animals, a few tweets singing “Privacy Fail!” will go out, but everyone generally moves on pretty quickly. If you’ve applied to the beta and you’ve got an e-mail address you prefer to keep 100% private, though, you might consider switching it up.

You know, it’s been a while since we’ve seen a good ol’ fashion BCC fail. The last one I recall, actually, was our bad. As Mike put it at the time, “we can never make fun of anyone doing this again without pointing back to this post.“

We’ve reached out to Google to try and pin down how many e-mail addresses could have found their way out. We’ll update this post if we hear back.

Update #1 – Google has apologized quickly. Good on them:

Hi,

We recently sent out an email welcoming you to real time analytics. Inadvertently, we put the email addresses in the To: field instead of the BCC: field. We want to sincerely apologize for this mistake and will make sure that this does not happen again. Thank you for your understanding.

On Behalf of the Google Real-Time Analytics Team.

Update #2 – Hah! The recipients of the e-mail have already formed a Facebook group they’ve dubbed “The Accidental brothers of Real-time Awesomeness“

When startups are choosing investors for their seed round, it is important to pick ones who will stick around for the long run. Otherwise, they may run into what Founder Collective co-founder Chris Dixon calls “signaling risk.”  The risk of getting a high-profile investor in your seed round is that they might not follow on in later rounds, and that sends a signal to other investors that there might be something wrong with the company. Dixon discusses signaling risk in this episode of Founder Stories with Steve Anderson of Baseline Ventures.

In recent years, there’s been an uptick in seed stage investing to the point where “large VC’s [are] investing in seed companies,” notes Dixon.  He is of the opinion that it’s risky for founders to take their cash because “if the big VC doesn’t follow on it makes it harder for the entrepreneur to raise the next round.”

Anderson agrees that picking the correct investment partner is paramount and referring directly to high-end VCs pouring into seed funding, he says it is basically illogical to think a fund managing hundreds of millions will give the same attention to small investments as large investments. This becomes an issue when “you have entrepreneurs who are looking for help … and then they didn’t get any.”

This is their opinion as seed stage investors – however the best VC’s would likely tell you: they like to invest early and stick with their companies all the way through.

Nevertheless, “the signaling issue is real” says Anderson, “my advice always is think about the motivations of the people that are coming in, how helpful will they be, how much help do you want, what are you looking for and then size your investment from them appropriately.”

The conversation continues in the video below and the two use a Wall Street Journal article titled Web Start-ups Hit A Cash Crunch, to discuss if the start-up sector is suffering a downturn. Dixon doesn’t agree that it is, saying “the market has been very, very strong for quality companies.” Anderson agrees with Dixon and says, “I think that article was really more of a forecast of a possible outcome in the future … but not a reality today.”

Anderson then adds “seed rounds are about product market fit and establishing something of value and in my opinion those will always get funding as long as you are doing those core things, if your thesis was wrong and you tried and it didn’t work out, well of course you are not going to get funding.”

The two end with Anderson offering what he considers to be a strong start-up bets in the future. He says, “the ecosystem that is evolving around Facebook is undeniably going to be one of the most powerful ecosystems going foward.”

Make sure to watch both videos for additional insights and check out episodes I and II to hear the entire conversation.

Past episodes of Founder stories featuring Instagram, BirchBox and Eventbrite are here.

(Disclosure, Dixon is an investor in Baseline funds)

RIM may be pinning their hopes on BBX, but that doesn’t mean they’re done churning out classic BlackBerrys. Case in point: the revamped Bold 9790 has been revealed in a new set of photos that doesn’t look like someone took them during an earthquake.

The 9790′s existence isn’t exactly a secret, but these images (courtesy of @moha87_) represent the most up-to-date look at what RIM is working on behind closed doors. Right off the bat, you’ll notice that the new Bold (on the left) sports a funky new “home row” of keys that already seem to have polarized the BlackBerry fanbase.

The rest of the improvements are a bit harder to discern: a 2.44-inch touch display sits up front, and a 5-megapixel camera rests on the back. It runs the BlackBerry 7 OS (naturally), and finally moves the charging port to the bottom of the device. Anecdotal evidence also reveals that it feels “lighter and slimmer” than the current Bold 9700.

Interestingly, the Twitter account belongs to a gentleman named Mohammad Al Bastaki who just happens to live in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Could it be a simple coincidence that RIM and Porsche Design are holding an event tomorrow in that very city to show off their exclusive new collaboration? Maybe — it doesn’t exactly scream Porsche, but I’m half-hoping that this design takes the stage instead of the angular nightmare we saw last time.

There’s been some chatter about how Conde Nast’s tablet editions of its popular magazines, which have enjoyed a large increase in subscribers since the release of Apple’s Newsstand feature. It must be a pleasant surprise to the company, which as late as April was easing back on tablet content production after a less-than-stellar debut period. A lot can happen in six months, though: for example, 20 million iPads were sold. That’s a big increase in the demographic. And of course the designated channel for magazine-type content helps as well.

As pleasant as this news is (I’m all in favor of bringing print-quality content to digital devices), I think this portion of the tablet experience is still very much an early-adopter, minority share situation. They’re probably patting each other’s backs at Conde Nast, but the champagne is still in the fridge.

The question is whether the growth is a continuing trend, or a one-time bump owing entirely to the fanfare around the new feature and iOS 5. If there are around 50 million iPads out there (just for ease of calculation), and Conde Nast had a 268% increase month-over-month of its <500,000-user base, that puts total subscribers at somewhere just over 1.2 million, with around 2% of iPad users having a subscription, or what is more likely, 1% with more than one apiece. Sure, it's just napkin calculations, but that's not quite the fabulous new playground for magazines that's indicated when you just look at the increase by itself.

Will the novelty wear off? The Newsstand is something that costs people money, which turns off a lot of people from the start. They'd rather use the 90% of the device's functionality that they already bought. The early adopters of the iPad are also the most likely to shell out for magazines and pay apps, so the market isn't growing as fast as people think: the first million sold probably account for a disproportionate amount of in-app and on-device purchases.

Magazines and "print" on tablets is certainly an inevitability, but I don't think we're looking at the breakout moment here. The erosion of the print infrastructure, and the millions of paper-based subscriptions so easy to renew, so high quality (in their way), and so familiar, will take more than a fancy storefront in iOS and more than a year or two of modest increases in sales. Luckily the players involved (especially Conde Nast, which was developing for the iPad before it’s existence was confirmed) are willing to shell out so they'll be in pole position when that breakout moment comes.