Barnes & Noble Uses Crunchies Endorsement On In Store Nook Posters. We Want One.
We were somewhat sad when Barnes & Noble sent their PR firm to accept their award for the Nook for Best Gadget of 2009 at the Crunchies in January. Traditionally only Apple blows off the awards, and we’ve always been able to work around that.
But apparently Barnes & Noble are at least aware that they won the award. They are using it to promote the Nook on in-store posters, we learned recently. We sent TechCruncher Laura Boychenko over to the local Barnes & Noble last night with strict instructions to rip one of the posters off the wall and run like hell back to the office with it.
She failed in her task, but did take a few pictures and a video and promised to ask Barnes & Noble for one of the posters for our office. Less dramatic, but just as effective I guess.
I’m not suggesting anyone should commit a crime, but if someone were to obtain one (legally, mind you) and show up at our office with one of these we’d likely send them away with a thank you and a TechCrunch tshirt. No questions asked. Video is below.
AMD working on actual netbook chipset, not due until next year
AMD is finally looking to get into the netbook game for real.
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AMD working on actual netbook chipset, not due until next year
AOL, Intel, And The New York Times Help betaworks Raise A $20 Million Series B
Betaworks, the New York City-based holding company investing in the realtime Web, just raised a $20 million Series B. The round was led by RRE Ventures and Intel Capital, DFJ Growth, AOL Ventures, The New York Times, Softbank Japan and Softbank NY, Lerer Investments and Founders Collective, also participated, along with investors from the last round, which was $7.5 million
The company both invests and incubates realtime media startups, including Summize (acquired by Twitter for realtime search), bit.ly, TweetDeck, StockTwits, SuperFeedr, Outside.in, OMGPOP, and gdgt.
CEO John Borthwick says that the funds will be used to do more of the same, invest in and create realtime media startups.
Video Demo: Google Reader Play is clearly meant for a tablet computer
We all know that there will be an onslaught of touchscreen computers this year and next. But the Internet really isn’t touchscreen friendly. It was designed for a mouse, not finger input.
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Video Demo: Google Reader Play is clearly meant for a tablet computer
Consumer Reports Says Apple Has The Best Tech Support, Acer/Gateway/eMachines The Worst
Consumer Reports has a new report on which computer company has the best tech support. Apple wins! That’s what happens when the same company controls the hardware as well as the operating system (and several of the most prominent pieces of software). The highest ranking PC manufacturer is Dell for desktops and Lenovo for laptops.
Evri Acquires Radar Networks In Semantic Search Consolidation
After shopping itself around to all the major search engines, Radar Networks finally found a buyer in another semantic search startup. Today, Evri is announcing that it will be acquiring Radar Networks, along with its core technical team and its main product, Twine. Rumors surfaced yesterday on ReadWriteWeb that Evri was being acquired, but that is not the case. Evri is the acquirer.
I spoke with both CEOs this morning. They would not disclose the terms of the deal, but it is safe to assume that it was largely an equity-based transaction. Both Evri and Radar Networks share Paul Allen’s Vulcan Capital as their largest shareholder. Radar has raised $24 million in total capital, while Evri has raised $8 million. (At least that is what has been publicly disclosed. Paul Allen has poured much more money into Evri almost single-handedly, perhaps even more than Radar raised). Radar was unable to raise more during the recession and kept pushing out the release of its next product, T2, an ambitious project to create a semantic index of the Web. Using this semantic index, T2 can do a better job understanding what each Web page it indexes is about.
Evri, on the other hand, has been focusing more on filtering the realtime Web and then creating a semantic index of those pages based on matching similar content. One of the big drivers of the deal was the promise of combining Evri’s realtime filtering with T2, which is ideal for more evergreen and authoritative content.
“We had to find a home,” explains Radar CEO Nova Spivack. “Fortunately, we had T2 and a portfolio of fundamentally valuable IP. And user growth is holding steady even though we are no longer working on Twine” He also confirmed that he was “in discussions” with larger companies. Why did he choose Evri? “At the end of the day, not only was it a better offer, but Evri is more compatible with our team. Joining one of the larger players was a possibility, but it meant we would not get to work on T2.” Spivack will be an advisor to the combined company. He wrote a blog post about the deal.
Semantic search is still in its infancy. Consolidation among startups could give the acquirers more firepower, but eventually the bigger search engines are going to start getting serious.
Euro Startup Competition Plugg Names Fits.me Its Winner
Fits.me, a virtual fitting room for internet clothing retailers based on robots (yes really) has won the European startup competition in Brussels, Plugg.
It’s actually even cooler than it sounds. By creating robotic shape-shifting manakins and testing how people reacted by seeing clothes on the robot with their dimensions, sales actually went up.
Only 7% of all clothing is sold online today, a $36bn market It’s $20bn for computers), because you can’t see how the clothes look on a human body. The fits.me trial with partners showed these pictures of adjustable manakins wearing clothes increased sales three times and dramatically reduced returns by 28%.
Disney turns its Monorail into huge Tron light cycles
Tron Legacy is nerds wet dream come true. The movie will hopefully invoke the same sort of futuristic imagination as the original. You’ve watched the trailer , right
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Disney turns its Monorail into huge Tron light cycles
FlyScreen Adds Foursquare To Its Android Lock-screen App
FlyScreen, the mobile phone lock-screen replacement from Israeli startup Cellogic, has added Foursquare integration to its Android app ahead of this year’s South by Southwest festival.
The new Foursquare widget lets users of the location-based social network access its main features, including the ability to quickly find places nearby, “check-in”, share their location with friends via Foursquare, Twitter and/or Facebook, as well as access their foursquare friends-list.
Perseids, John Hughes, And G.I. Joe Are Trending Topics On Wikipedia
Google has Google Trends, Twitter has trending topics, and now so does Wikipedia. Pete Skomoroch, a Senior Research Scientist at LinkedIn and blogger at Data Wrangling, built a trending topics page for Wikipedia. The homepage ranks the top-25 Wikipedia articles with the most pageviews over the past 30 days, as well as the fastest rising articles in the past 24 hours.
Some of the most popular Wikipedia articles in the past month include ones on the Perseids meteor shower, Danish physicist Hans Christian Ørsted, director John Hughes, and G.I. Joe: The Rise Of Cobra. These are quite different than the types of search trends you would find on Google trends or realtime trending topics on Twitter. Even the trending topics over the past 24 hours (District 9, Woodstock Festival, Usain Bolt, Gina Carano) are quite different than the hot searches on Google. And, no, I have no idea why Perseids was the top trending topic last month, it is usually visible in the summer.
You can search for any topic, and the you will get a chart showing pageview trends, along with the actual article placed in an iFrame below the chart. It’s as good a way as any to explore Wikipedia. The site is built on Cloudera’s version of Hadoop.
