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WakeMate’s quest to help you kiss your groggy mornings goodbye continues. The Y Combinator-funded startup has become something of a poster child for the mantra “Hardware is hard” — when the company debuted its gadget in November, it promised to start shipping devices the following January. That didn’t happen, and the company didn’t have a concrete date for when the first batch might ship. A few units shipped in April, but the company wouldn’t say how many, so it probably wasn’t a very encouraging figure. Now, it looks like there may finally be a light at the end of the tunnel.

WakeMate has posted an update to its blog that indicates that it’s optimistic about having a large chunk of orders out close to the end of the month (though it sounds like that may slip a bit). From their post:

A lot has happened since April, besides what we’ve shown on the blog. To highlight, we’ve:
Lined up a local manufacturing partner for faster turnaround
Designed and implemented a new board layout that gives vastly improved Bluetooth performance as well as battery life
Sourced all parts for said board
Designed and prototyped a new wristband, currently in its final production revision
Expanded and improved phone support
Iterated on the Analytics site, making it more useful and eye-catching
Dealt with regulation, Apple approval, packaging, etc.

So where does this leave us in terms of shipping by the end of July? We remain optimistic—if we don’t make it by month’s end, we’ll definitely get close. We’re addressing a couple minor snags but the hard problems have been solved and it’s now a matter of urging the gears of industry to turn more quickly; something they’re not accustomed to doing. In April, we felt it extremely conservative to say we’d be shipping by July 30th; as any new company can tell you, things never happen the way you think they will and we were no exception.

WakeMate’s product consists of a $50 wristband that you wear while you’re sleeping, which can analyze your sleeping patterns and wake you up at the opportune time so that you can beat morning grogginess (also see the pricier Zeo Sleep Coach and Fitbit, which can track your sleep but doesn’t have the wake-up alarm). Data from the wristband is relayed to your phone — WakeMate is developing companion applications for the iPhone, Android, and BlackBerry. WakeMate’s delays have resulted in plenty of frustrated users, in part because WakeMate collected a five dollar downpayment for its pre-orders.

AdSafe Media, a brand verification platform, has raised $7.25 Million in Series B funding, led by Atlas Venture with participation from existing investors Founder Collective and others participating.

Launched in May 2009, AdSafe Media uses algorithmic modeling and human verification to rate and verify the brand safety of content on commercially supported Web pages via a proprietary system. The rating then allow advertisers to properly place display advertising campaigns of sites.

AdSafe plans to open its Content Rating API late this year to integrate with real-
time-bidding and demand-side ad platforms, giving advertisers information and data about the brand safety of every impression available for purchase.

The company recently released a report that provided an analysis of the key display advertising brand safety metrics and industry insights, which shows that 47% of traffic was served by exchanges, real-time-bidding (RTB) or demand-side (DSP) platforms. According to the report, premium brand advertisers seem to be shifting a larger percentage of their display adverting spending to exchanges, RTB and DSP platforms because of increased media efficiency and broader reach afforded by these channels.

AsSafe faces competition from DoubleVerify, AdXpose and others.

In terms of interesting backgrounds among people in the tech space, Jeff Ma has one of the most interesting. If you’ve read the book Bringing Down The House or seen the movie 21, the main character is based on Ma — yes, in the movie he’s a white guy, but still, that’s him. He was a member of MIT’s now famous blackjack team for seven years. From there, he went on to co-founder a sports startup, Citizen Sports, which Yahoo acquired this past March.

Ma is actually the only one of Citizen Sports 30-some employees that didn’t go over to Yahoo with the deal. Instead, he decided to take some time off to help promote his new book, The House Advantage: Playing the Odds to Win Big In Business. The book is an extension of talks Ma has given around the country relating risk-taking (or rather, calculated risk-taking) in both gambling and sports to advantageous moves in business.

Below, find a conversation I had with Ma on TechCrunch TV today. We talk about everything from blackjack, to the new Facebook movie (based on a book written by the same author who wrote Bringing Down The House, Ben Mezrich, whom Ma knows well), to Yahoo, to Ma’s own book, to where LeBron may be going.

You can find The House Advantage on Amazon here.

Last week, we noted that Best Buy was looking into firing the employee that made the hilarious EVO versus iPhone 4 video (and the rebuttal video). The employee, 25-year-old Brian Maupin, was placed on suspension as Best Buy decided what they wanted to do. Today brings some good news: they’ve decided not to fire Maupin. But Maupin has decided not to return to work just yet, as he’s not sure he’s comfortable with the situation.

In their statement about the situation (below), Best Buy humorously refers to Maupin as “the aspiring film-maker.” The company notes that they took their time coming to a decision about what to do because they wanted to ensure they were maintaing a supportive environment for employees, while also making sure employees couldn’t openly disparage customers, vendor partners, and other employees.

Best Buy says that three video in particular caught their attention, and that those videos have now been taken down. What’s interesting here is that the three videos apparently don’t include the two most popular ones. Maupin originally told us that there were a “couple other videos” on his account that did reference Best Buy in a comical manner and that he took those down immediately when the company asked. He said they were also asking him to take down the more popular videos, but he refused to do that, as they don’t mention Best Buy in any way (but do mention brands Best Buy carries).

But Best Buy is now apparently doing a 180 on what they initially told Maupin. Now, they’re indicating they only cared about the other videos in question (which, again, mentioned Best Buy specifically). But that wasn’t the case last week, according to Maupin. “According to the statement BBY issued, the videos they were offended over are gone, but 2 of them they took issue with are up, so maybe they’ve realized those two don’t mention Best Buy or maybe they’re just settling, considering the spotlight on them,” Maupin tells us.

Undoubtedly, without the two popular videos, which now have nearly 4 million views combined on YouTube, none of this would have been brought to Best Buy’s attention in the first place.

At the end of their statement, Best Buy notes that Maupin is scheduled to return to work on Friday. Unfortunately, they apparently didn’t clear that with Maupin himself. “I’m not planning on returning to work — immediately, anyway. Honestly, I don’t know how I could return considering some of the things that were said to me and not have a lot of awkwardness on the job. I’m looking at possible jobs in graphic art — nothing definite yet, but I’m searching,” he tells us.

Below, find Best Buy’s full statement on the matter and then Maupin’s official one. And, of course, the videos below that.

Best Buy:

We have completed our investigation into the videos created and posted by Brian Maupin, the aspiring film-maker and Best Buy employee.  This is an important situation for us because it involved balancing our social media guidelines with a commitment to creating a supportive environment for our employees.  It’s important to note that our investigation involved three videos that were posted in late June because they were openly disparaging of our employees, our customers and our vendor partners.  Our investigation is over, and these videos are no longer on the web.  Contrary to rumors, Brian has not been fired, and is scheduled to return to his job at Best Buy this Friday

Maupin:

Right now I’m planning on taking a leave of absence so I may survey my current career plans and the future. I’m not sure if it would be comfortable returning to Best Buy considering the circumstances, but I will definitely consider all options

ReadWriteWeb had a solid scoop last week when it uncovered Twitter was set to go live with an account called @EarlyBird. Well, it has just gone live, with a tweet pointing to this page where the company explains what it’s all about.

Looks like Twitter is about to start offering users exclusive, time-bound deals, events and sneak peeks, for which it has partnered with a number of (yet unnamed) advertising partners.

Those advertisers will distribute offers via the @EarlyBird account, and they get to determine the terms of the offer, including availability, amount, and pricing. And you? You get to opt in to them.

If you want to get access to said exclusive deals, you need to of course follow the @EarlyBird account, although you may also see offers if someone you follow retweets a tweet from that account. Yes, that means exclusive deals are bound to get viral pretty quickly, which will be interesting to observe given that many of the offers distributed via the account will be time-sensitive of nature (otherwise it wouldn’t be called Early Bird, of course).

Twitter outlines that it has deals with select advertisers in place, but welcomes suggestions of a product/event sent by @reply to @earlybird. Nevertheless, since Twitter clearly looks at this like a significant potential revenue stream, they are keen on emphasizing that it will be selective about the type of deals they highlight.

Also worth noting: the company suggests that deals will come mostly at the beginning of the day (it’s safe to assume that they mean the start of the day throughout the United States, at least at first).

As for internationally available offers:

Will these deals be targeted toward Twitter’s many users outside the United States?

At first, many of the advertising partners will be large, international brands or focused on the U.S. market. As @earlybird grows beyond this first early phase, so will the deals in different places.

Finally, it’s worth pointing out that at the end of the list of questions presented on the introductory page, Twitter makes it clear that while it is kicking things off with US-wide offers, the company will explore location-based and even thematic (e.g. fashion or music) deals in the future. This could get pretty big, pretty quickly, in my opinion.

Now let’s see how many followers the @EarlyBird account gains in the next few days. At the time of publication, it had 833 followers.

For Twitter, this is far from the first or only attempt at generating revenue. It currently rents out access to its data ‘firehose’ to notable Web giants such as Yahoo, Google and Microsoft and is actively experimenting with Promoted Tweets and Trending topics.

For the record, Twitter has raised a staggering $160 million in funding to date, and we believe the valuation of the company to run up to $1 billion.

Do you think it’s worth that much?

I’d been living under Apple TV hegemony for about two years I bought an early 40GB model, upgraded it to 80GB, and then hacked it. When hacked, the Apple TV is actually useful. Hacked it was, in short, one of the easiest ways to get video on my NAS or networked Macs to my TV. Unhacked it’s sort of like a really nice guy who works in insurance sales: you want to like him but he keeps trying to sell you stuff and he’s really boring.

Slowly but surely, however, the ATV hit its limit. I ran out of disk space and didn’t want to upgrade and XBMC was choking on larger files. The device itself was as hot as a griddle most of the time and I worried that at some point I’d have a bricked device on my hands. I went on a quest for a networked device to do two things: stream audio from multiple sources, including my library of MP3s, and to play video from a NAS drive over the network. If it could play Netflix that would be gravy. I put a number of devices to the test and have come up with a real winner.

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A patent applied for by Amazon in 2006 has been made public today as a consequence of its being granted, and its language is rather more wide-ranging (and forward-thinking) than we might have expected. Depending on the interpretation, Amazon’s patent may be broad enough to justify a lawsuit over devices like the Nook and Alex, both of which sport a design clearly claimed by Amazon.

The relevant language in the patent starts off thus:

5. A handheld electronic device comprising: a first display for presenting visible representations of content, the first display comprising an electronic paper display; and a second display positioned alongside the first display, wherein the second display includes a plurality of graphic elements that correspond to portions of the first display, and wherein the second display is responsive to user input to one of the graphic elements to perform at least one action on content shown in a portion of the first display that corresponds to the one graphic element.

That alone would be be sufficient to give pause to the designers of similar devices — and unfortunately for them, it gets worse.

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