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Tuesday, January 14, 2014
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sony-xperia

Sony is adding two smartphones to its growing stable of devices. Meet the Xperia T2 Ultra and the Xperia E1 — both substantial updates to Sony’s 2013 models. Best yet, both are offered in dual-sim variants.


These latest phones join the Z1S and Z1 announced last week at CES. However, it seems Sony held these close to its chest, as they’re somewhat mundane and not destined for the U.S. market. And, as Sony found out from years of experience, to “win” CES requires focused and streamlined announcements and not a proverbial conveyor belt of press releases.


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Sony is up front about the T2 Ultra’s destination: This phone is for emerging markets like China, the Middle East, Africa and the Asia-Pacific rim, touts the press release. But this phone isn’t lacking in any substantial way. It’s packed to the gills with the best Sony has to offer, including a near edgeless design with a 6-inch screen and a 13MP camera. The major downside of the phone comes in the way of a quad-core 1.4 GHz Snapdragon of an unannounced pedigree. However, the battery life is likely stellar thanks to this slower SoC and 3000 mAh battery.


The E1 is the budget phone in the mix. It leans on Sony’s audio brand and sports a speaker capable of hitting 100Db in case you want to share your love of Neil Young with co-workers in a different office building. Up front is a 4-inch screen, up from 3.2-inches found in the Xperia E released in early 2013.


There is no word on pricing or release dates, though. Sony is likely holding that information until Mobile World Congress in February.


With these latest models, Sony is continuing down the course of offering a simplified device lineup. The company is putting a lot of emphasis on just a few devices in each market unlike in the past when it would flood the scene with countless SKUs.







12:10 AM

Sony is adding two smartphones to its growing stable of devices. Meet the Xperia T2 Ultra and the Xperia E1 — both substantial updates to So...

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Monday, January 13, 2014
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invoca

Invoca, the call marketing company formerly known as RingRevenue, is announcing that it has raised $20 million in Series C funding.


The company has now raised more than $30 million, with the current round led by Accel Partners. Upfront Ventures and Rincon Venture Partners also participated, and Accel’s Kobie Fuller has joined the company’s board of directors.


“Despite the fact that their highest-value leads arrive through phone calls, CMOs are routinely stymied by the call channel, assuming that it lacks the same measurement and optimization that other digital channels possess,” Fuller said in the funding release. “Invoca is determined to change that mindset by offering the most effective solutions available to enterprise marketers in this channel.”


Invoca’s products include call tracking, call analytics, and custom treatment based on factors like location and whether they’re a new customer. It also integrates with other sales and marketing products including Salesforce.com, Adobe, Kenshoo, Marketo, iCrossing, Cake, Tealium, and HasOffers.


The company supposedly saw an annual growth rate of 200 percent last year. It says that it’s used by “more than 3,000 marketers” including those at Liberty Mutual Insurance, OpenTable, Answer Financial and DirecTV.


An Invoca spokesperson told me that the company plans to open a Bay Area office (it’s headquartered in Santa Barbara, Calif.) and double its workforce to more than 150 people in the next year. It will also be spending more on sales, marketing, and product development, the spokesperson said.







9:10 PM

Invoca , the call marketing company formerly known as RingRevenue , is announcing that it has raised $20 million in Series C funding. The co...

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YouTube today launched a new tool for managing comments on its site that gives video creators a central inbox for all the comments their videos receive.


When YouTube made the controversial switch to Google+ comments, it also added a number of new tools for managing these comments. With this change, however, it also took away the ability to manage comments from the YouTube Inbox and moved comment notices to alerts instead.


YouTube’s users weren’t all that happy about this change, so as the company announced today, it “fast-tracked the development of a new comment management page that lets you see, respond to and moderate your comments all in one place.” This change essentially brings the old YouTube Inbox back.


Using this page, video owners can quickly scan their comments, remove offensive ones, flag comments for spam and give comments a thumbs up. The new comments inbox is divided into areas for published comments, pending comments and those marked as spam.


None of these changes will make a big difference for those who simply hate the new YouTube commenting system, but it will make life a bit easier for those who publish their videos on the site.







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YouTube today launched a new tool for managing comments on its site that gives video creators a central inbox for all the comments their v...

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This week, we are hosting Storm Ventures’ Jason Lemkin in TechCrunch TV studio for our Ask A VC show. As you may remember, you can submit questions for our guests either in the comments or here and we’ll ask them during the show.


Lemkin serves as managing director at Storm Ventures, a $500 million early-stage enterprise focused VC fund, which has led investments in Marketo, MobileIron, EchoSign, Appcelerator, Guidespark, Pipedrive, and other enterprise companies. Before Storm, he served as Vice President, Web Business Services at Adobe Systems after its acquisition of EchoSign, the company he co-founded and serves as CEO, in July 2011.


Previously, he also co-founded NanoGram Devices, which was acquired for $50 million. He also served as Vice President, Corporate Development at NeoPhotonics Corporation; and as Senior Director of Corporate Development at BabyCenter.com.


As a serial entrepreneur himself, Lemkin should have an interesting perspective around the challenges of founding and running a company, particularly in the enterprise world.


Please send us your questions for Lemkin here or put them in the comments below!







3:09 PM

This week, we are hosting Storm Ventures’ Jason Lemkin in TechCrunch TV studio for our Ask A VC show. As you may remember, you can submit q...

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bringrr

I’m a pretty patient person, but there’s one thing that instantly makes me go all ragey: driving away from home only to realize I forgot to put something important in my car. That U-turn? It feels like defeat. If I’m already running late when I notice my mistake, prepare to learn some new swear words.


Bringrr is a gadget for people like me. It sits in your car’s cigarette lighter port, quietly keeping tabs on what you’ve packed. If it notices that something is missing, it’ll let you know now, before you realize it 10 miles later.


Bringrr actually first launched in its first form back in 2010, focusing on helping you remember one item: your phone. If you turned on your car and Bringrr detected that your phone wasn’t within Bluetooth range, it’d light up and let out a noise to give you a heads up.


But remembering your phone is the easy part. Many of us pretty much live on our phones, these days, so it’s either in our pocket, in our hands, or gettin’ charged back up. Remembering all that other stuff — the stuff that isn’t blooping and bleeping at you constantly — is the hard part. Things like your wallet, or your camera, or that file you were supposed to bring to work today that you’re suddenly remembering just as the traffic in front of you goes all gridlock.

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For all that stuff, Bringrr has introduced an object tagging system very much like that of Tile. In addition to looking for your phone, the car charger can also be configured to be on the lookout for little stick-on Bluetooth LE tags that the company calls “BringTags”. Want to make sure you remember your phone, wallet, backpack, and laptop? Pair the charger with your phone, pop a tag in your wallet and backpack, and stick one to your laptop lid. Next time you get in your car without one of’em, the charger will let you know.


Of course, there are some items you don’t need with you every day. Maybe you don’t want to drag your work laptop around with you on weekends. Thats okay — with their configuration app, you can tell the charger to only care about certain devices on certain days.

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Outside of the car, though, Bringrr still wants to help you keep track of your stuff. You can ping each tag for its proximity, allowing you to triangulate your way back to lost keys. And if you still can’t find it? A backup panic button makes the tag ring out loud. The whole thing is very much like the aforementioned Tile, with the clever twist of knowing to be on the lookout as soon as your car turns on.


While I love any concept that promises to make me forget things (and thus rage) less often, there’s one flaw: the more likely I am to have tagged something, the less like it is it’s something I’ll forget. That is, the stuff that’s easiest to forget is the stuff we don’t already bring with us every day (like that important work folder) — and unless we’re constantly sticking/unsticking these things from everything around us, those one-off items probably won’t be tagged.


Bringrr is trying to raise $75,000 on Kickstarter, and it’s just shy of halfway there with 21 days to go. $39 gets backers just a charger, while kits with BringTags included start at $49.







3:09 PM

I’m a pretty patient person, but there’s one thing that instantly makes me go all ragey: driving away from home only to realize I forgot to...

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Huzzah! A group in Germany has created a new food-grade polypropylene filament for 3D printers that is food safe and washable. Most current 3D printing filaments, while not exactly poisonous, can react in negative ways to moisture and acids, resulting in some nasty stuff. For example, you could use this to print anything from a plate to a pitcher.


The filament costs $129 for a 2 kg roll. Apparently, as we see from this picture, it also makes great candy dishes.


The plastic is as washable as any standard food storage container and it is highly flexible. It is produced according “to US FDA regulations and the relevant EU standards” to maintain safety and can even be used in children’s toys. Now, finally, you can suck on your 3D printed objects!


via 3Ders







2:40 PM

Huzzah! A group in Germany has created a new food-grade polypropylene filament for 3D printers that is food safe and washable. Most current...

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Twitter is rolling out a new design on the web today that eliminates the pop-up compose window and brings its look more in line with its mobile apps. We’ve been seeing Twitter test versions of this design for some time now, but this particular one appears to be the test bucket that got the best reaction from users.


It looks, in some ways, a lot like the old version of Twitter — with a profile box and other information presented to the left of the main timeline. One of the biggest changes, of course, is that there is now an inline compose box on the left side, allowing you to pound out tweets without having to deal with the pop-up compose box. The pop up is still accessible via the ‘new tweet’ button in the upper right corner and the keyboard shortcut.


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Placing a compose box right in the left column should make the interface feel a bit lighter weight, inviting people to tweet out a bit more than placing it ‘under’ the compose button. I’d guess that this was aimed at converting lurkers to tweeters.


If some of you are looking at this design and thinking ‘hmm, this is how mine has looked for weeks’, then congratulations, you’re in one of Twitter’s test buckets. The company experiments heavily, giving 1% of its users a tweaked or refreshed design and testing how they interact with it before rolling out changes on a wider scale. We’ve been getting reports of this particular design — or one with some of its elements — for a few weeks now.


The alignment of Twitter’s web edition with its mobile versions for iOS and Android certainly makes sense. A large recent release saw major changes in both design and functionality. The web version has lagged a bit behind those releases in the interim, but now feels much more at home.


Image Credit: John Verive







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Twitter is rolling out a new design on the web today that eliminates the pop-up compose window and brings its look more in line with its mo...

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