Random Post

Wednesday, February 19, 2014
no image
PediaPress Wikipedia

This is not a joke. PediaPress launched an Indiegogo campaign to print the entire English Wikipedia encyclopedia on around 1,000 books, representing more than a million pages. The startup printed the first volume to see how it would look — in it, you will find all the articles from “A” to “A76 motorway”.


More than 4 million articles from 20 million volunteers could end up in the printed edition of Wikipedia. But first, the company needs to raise $50,000. You can donate from $5 up to $1,000 to sponsor the work. If it succeeds, the books will be presented at the Wikimania Conference 2014 in London. After that, the books will be donated to a big public library.


As a reminder, PediaPress is an on-demand printing startup for Wikipedia articles. While it’s mostly unknown, you can find a link to create a book in the left column of Wikipedia. After compiling articles, you can order a printed book.


PediaPress CEO Eingestellt von Heiko writes in a blog post that a German user planned to print the entire German Wikipedia using the service. “After doing some back of the envelope calculations and exchanging emails, we mutually agreed to drop his plan,” von Heiko writes. “But the idea was born and stuck with us.”


But it doesn’t tell us why it’s a good idea. Printing Wikipedia is a way to celebrate the gigantic work of the Wikipedia community over the past years. If the company gets enough money, it even plans to go on tour with the printed Wikipedia edition. The project also let you visualize how big Wikipedia is compared to the Encyclopædia Britannica.


But the most obvious reason is probably simpler. This campaign is a great communication move for PediaPress. Now everyone will know that Wikipedia readers can handpick a few dozen Wikipedia articles and print a book. In other words, printing Wikipedia is a fun way to spread the word about PediaPress. And as PediaPress developer Konrad says in the Indiegogo video, “somebody has to do it.”





9:58 AM

This is not a joke. PediaPress launched an Indiegogo campaign to print the entire English Wikipedia encyclopedia on around 1,000 books, re...

Read more »
Posted by at 9:58 AM 0 comments
Labels:
no image
sessions app

Sessions, the behavioral health startup that launched out of the Rock Health startup incubator in June 2012, has been acquired by MyFitnessPal for an undisclosed sum. This is MyFitnessPal’s first acquisition.


The three-person Sessions team will be joining MyFitnessPal in San Francisco this month. The future of the Sessions app (which TechCrunch’s Ryan Lawler reviewed in November 2013) is unclear. In a blog post announcing the deal, Sessions co-founder Nick Crocker wrote, “though our program is going to have to be reimagined for MyFitnessPal’s 50MM+ users, our mission and vision remain unchanged.” We’ve reached out for more details and will update with any further information we receive.


Sessions raised less than $1 million in funding from Rock Health, SV Angel, Collaborative Fund, Blackbird and Joshua Kushner.





9:12 AM

Sessions , the behavioral health startup that launched out of the Rock Health startup incubator in June 2012 , has been acquired by MyFitnes...

Read more »
Posted by at 9:12 AM 0 comments
Labels:
no image
poptiplogo

PopTip, the Techstars-backed startup that offers real-time language tracking across social platforms, has today launched its Zipline analytics tool on Instagram.


Unlike PopTip questions, the product that launched the brand, Zipline doesn’t require brands to poll or ask a question to their audiences. Instead, brands can simply choose which words, phrases, etc. they want tracked and then watch the conversations play out right in front of them.


“We saw some really interesting patterns regarding the relationship between browsing on Instagram and purchasing power, so we wanted to get on Instagram to track the conversation,” said co-founder Kelsey Falter. “We have analysis going on Twitter and Instagram for Nike right now, and it turns out that there is 4x the volume of Nike mentions on Instagram than on Twitter, and that’s powerful information for Nike to have.”


When PopTip first launched back in summer of 2012, the company offered a polling product, letting brands ask things like: “do you wear #boxers or #briefs?”


PopTip would then offer a dashboard showing real time conversations around the questions and answers, even if respondents didn’t use a hashtag or spell the word correctly. At its core, after all, PopTip technology is all about natural language processing and tracking in real-time.


At launch, the analytics tool was only available on Twitter.


But in March of 2013, the company expanded their tracking tools to Facebook, letting brands get a true window into their following across multiple platforms.


Shortly after, PopTip launched Zipline, which takes the “polling” out of the equation and simply lets brands watch things play out as they normally would across social networks. With the launch of Zipline for Instagram, brands on PopTip can monitor the conversation across all three of the major network.


instagram-zipline-release


If you want to check out how Zipline on Instagram works, check out the demo here.


Zipline customers pay a flat rate of $6,500/month, which lets them track anywhere between 30 million and 50 million messages across all platforms.


PopTip has grown from 3 to 10 full-time employees, with 30 customers, including brands such as L’Oreal, NBA, ESPN, NFL, Spotify, Budweiser and Yoplait.


The New York-based company has raised a total of $2.5 million to date in angel funding from Lerer Ventures, SoftBank Capital, RSE Ventures, David Tisch, Scott Belsky, Soraya Darabi, Amer Rehman, Steve Martocci, Jared Hecht, Ori Allon, Tricia Black and Lee Ann Daly.





9:12 AM

PopTip , the Techstars-backed startup that offers real-time language tracking across social platforms, has today launched its Zipline analyt...

Read more »
Posted by at 9:12 AM 0 comments
Labels:
no image
Bokeh-3

An MIT project that aimed to bring light field refocusing powers to existing cameras for less than a dollar is being spun out as its own commercial venture: Tesseract wants to provide the same capabilities to mobile devices, and the startup has the demos to prove it, using actual Android smartphone hardware using its technology.


Some of the flagship features of Tesseract include light field-style refocusing a la Lytro, albeit accomplished for much less money. At these rates, incorporating it into existing hardware becomes a lot more palatable for smartphone OEMs, which are constantly concerned about component costs when speccing out new devices.


In addition to refocusing after capture, it also offers up the ability to selectively separate foreground and background components, as well as apply special filter effects to different elements of the photo, and edit on different, automatically defined layers. It’s part RAW, part PSD but straight from your mobile device’s camera.


The plan for Tesseract is to sell its tech directly to OEMs for use in their devices, but there are many other potential uses, too. One client that founder Kshitij Marwah never expected is a bank with annual revenue in the billions that wants to use it to make their account opening process easier, he told me via email. The startup is also in ongoing discussions with smartphone manufacturers, other OEMs and banks to see how it might be adopted in their respective devices and processes.


Already, companies like HTC are reported to be introducing some of these features on their next-gen mobile devices. But HTC’s implementation seems to require multiple lenses and no doubt considerable expense on the component front. Qualcomm recently demoed mobile processors that offer selective refocusing thanks to improvements on the system-on-a-chip, but that too might be fairly costly to implement. With so many different approaches to this kind of camera innovation, one thing’s nearly certain: Within the next few years, no one should have to live with the focal composition they originally chose when they take a photo with their top-tier smartphone.





8:24 AM

An MIT project that aimed to bring light field refocusing powers to existing cameras for less than a dollar is being spun out as its own com...

Read more »
Posted by at 8:24 AM 0 comments
Labels:
no image
Grand-st

Online gadget retailer Grand St wants to be the go-to spot for interesting new hardware to be sold online. But after curating a daily selection of goods, the company is opening up its e-commerce shop for any hardware to list goods to be sold, as well as to test them out in beta and even make available for pre-order.


Grand St has spent the last year searching for all the best hardware products to list on its site and to make available through daily flash sales. Goods sold on the platform typically are listed for a week, although the best of the best have been added to the site’s “collection” of goods that are always for sale.


With the launch of its new marketplace, the company is extending its e-commerce platform to others who wish to leverage it as a new sales channel. Not only will hardware manufacturers be able to sell finished goods through the marketplace, but they’ll also be able to make them available for testing to beta users, as well as take pre-orders for their products.


Even better, Grand St will be taking no commission on goods that are put up for pre-order or beta testing. In doing so, the platform will compete against existing sales channels like Celery and Shoplocket — recently acquired by PCH International — for pre-order sales.


The company has already attracted hundreds of thousands of customers who have an affinity toward the types of interesting gadgets and hardware devices that are available on its site. As a result, it believes that it can provide hardware manufacturers with new potential buyers for their products.


Not everything will make the cut, however. According to Grand St co-founder Amanda Peyton, interested hardware manufacturers will need to apply to take part in the marketplace. To do so, they need only go to http://ift.tt/1bLuA9R and fill out information about their hardware products.


Like Apple and its App Store, Grand St will evaluate whether or not those goods should be listed alongside its other hardware products. They’ll be judged based on creativity, reliability, user experience, design, and delight factor. And for certain products, there’s the possibility of being featured as part of Grand St’s daily sales and in its email newsletter.


According to Peyton, the marketplace will launch with more than 150 total items, in pre-order, beta, or available for sale. Of the items that have been accepted, 15 percent of the new products listed are in beta, 35 percent are available for pre-order, and the final 50 percent are available for purchase on the shop.


Grand St has raised $1.3 million in funding from First Round Capital, David Tisch, Gary Vaynerchuk, betaworks, Collaborative Fund, MESA+, Quotidian Ventures, and Undercurrent.





6:39 AM

Online gadget retailer Grand St wants to be the go-to spot for interesting new hardware to be sold online. But after curating a daily selec...

Read more »
Posted by at 6:39 AM 0 comments
Labels:
no image
Humble Store

Video game store Humble Bundle announced that the Humble Store has switched to more traditional Steam-like prices, with different prices depending on your region. European customers will have to pay more for some games if the publisher chooses to set higher prices in Europe.


Humble Bundle is mostly known for its Humble Indie Bundles and smaller weekly bundles. So far, Humble Bundle has mostly been about indie games. Even though the company released a couple of bundles with major publishers like EA, small developers and publishers are still on center stage. Similarly, the company has started experimenting with ebook and audio book bundles.


Backed by Y Combinator and SV Angel, the startup recently opened the Humble Store, a more traditional store that allows you to purchase individual games just like you would on Steam or gog.com.


The Humble Store has had compelling arguments to seduce gamers. Most games are cross-platform, DRM-free and come with a Steam key to activate the game on Steam. Moreover, charities, such as the American Red Cross, Child’s Play Charity, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, World Land Trust and Charity Water, receive 10 percent of the proceedings — Humble Bundle keeps 15 percent.


But one of the key differentiating element was also pricing. Everything was in USD, so you knew that you wouldn’t have to pay 20 or 30 percent more because of price differences between regions like on competing platforms. If your bank account wasn’t in USD, PayPal is pretty good at providing a good conversion rate.


Now, there are two scenarios. If Humble Bundle handles the conversion, it will sell the game at the same price in USD, EUR or GBP, without adding any VAT. But if the publisher wants to set different prices, the company will let the publisher do so. Like on Steam, there is apparently no way to choose your currency, so European customers will sometimes be forced to pay more for the same game. Many publishers could now choose to set the same prices in USD, EUR and GBP on the Humble Store and Steam.


For now, the Humble Store only added Euro and British Pound. If you don’t live in a country that accepts these currencies, you will still pay in U.S. dollars. The big bundles and the weekly bundles will still work the same way — everything will be in USD.





6:39 AM

Video game store Humble Bundle announced that the Humble Store has switched to more traditional Steam-like prices, with different prices d...

Read more »
Posted by at 6:39 AM 0 comments
Labels:
no image
htc-one-leak

HTC is set to unveil its next-generation flagship phone, and all indications are that it will continue what it has accomplished with last year’s HTC One, but with some tweaks and enhancements to push things forward. A new leaked image from @evleaks today reveals that the new One could be very similar indeed to the old One on the outside, albeit with improvements to the camera system.


The press shot depicts an HTC One that looks like the aluminum device HTC released last year, but with a gold tint (it’s said to be launching in gold, silver and gray). Also noteworthy are the twin camera lenses on the back of the device, which include the larger primary one found on current models and the smaller one at the top of the case. There’s also a dual LED flash next to the main lens, which you might recognize from the similar setup on Apple’s own iPhone 5s, and more rounded corners, plus what looks like a wraparound metallic bezel, as compared to the plastic edging on the existing HTC One.


Rumors suggest that the new One will have dual camera sensors, to offer focus that can be changed after the fact and selective deletion of objects from photos, which explains the twin lenses. Based on what’s been making the rounds so far, HTC will be focusing on camera quality this time around, in a bid to give it something that clearly differentiates it from other Android OEMs.


Another feature of this leak is the prominence of HTC’s Sense UI on the home screen, where it seems to take over entirely. The interface resembles Windows Phone 8′s UI to some extent, with information pulled from feeds displayed on live tiles, which extend behind the Android home icon dock.


Personally, I’m excited to see what HTC comes up with to follow the extremely solid HTC One. It’s still among my favorite Android phones, right up there with the Nexus 5. My only concern is that HTC takes its positive critical reception as an excuse to coast this time around – that’s bound to fail in the highly competitive Android smartphone market, regardless of how good the original was.





6:39 AM

HTC is set to unveil its next-generation flagship phone, and all indications are that it will continue what it has accomplished with last ye...

Read more »
Posted by at 6:39 AM 0 comments
Labels:
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)
 
Google Analytics Alternative