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Posts Tagged ‘luxury’

To be fair, the $12,000 figure cited in the headline is pure guesswork on my part. But when the 40″ version of the TV, reviewed here at FlatPanelsHD , costs £6000 (about $10,000), it’s easy enough to do the math. These mega-lux TVs are meant to be the final word in current LCD TV technology — and will of course be worth less than a fig once AMOLED is the standard.

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Spend that tax return on a $12,000 46″ Bang and Olufsen TV (monocle not included)

It’s not looking to be a real revolutionary year for digital cameras.

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Samsung drops a bundle of new cameras

Altec Lansing announced three new products today – a docking station, a new set of computer speakers, and a set of headphones. While not exactly earth shattering, they do look to be some decent sounding products. First off, we’ve got yet another iPod dock

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Altec Lansing announces three new products for CES

There have been a few rumors swirling about the Courier tablet but our sources inside MS are stating that a Microsoft/HP-powered slate will appear at the CES 2010 keynote today. Our source reports that tablets will be a big part of the current line-up.

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Confirmed: Ballmer will be showing a slate at the CES keynote – but not the Courier

Taken during Samsung’s press conference.

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In Pictures: CES – the “E” stands for “EXCITEMENT”

At today’s Casio press conference, I lost a lot of faith. In the space of a year, they seem to have done the following: Added “artistic filters” to their cameras Increased speed of image processing by ~20% Decided 5x zoom wasn’t enough The result is the shockingly bad Digital Art Frame and the marginally improved FH100, successor to the great FC100, my favorite compact digital

Excerpt from: 
Casio’s FH100: an incremental update to an already-excellent digital camera

Austin, Texas based mobile social network GoWalla’s pre-money valuation in their recent financing was $20 million, we’ve confirmed from multiple sources. The company raised $8.4 million in that round, making their post-money valuation $28.4 million.

That’s not bad for a service that launched just weeks ago and has 50,000 users. Part of GoWalla’s valuation is based on their PackRat Facebook application that still brings in “single digit millions” in revenue. But it’s clear that Greylock, Shasta and the other investors in that round are focused on GoWalla’s mobile strategy.

Silicon Valley based competitor foursquare has just over 150,000 users, and has raised just $1.35 million in funding. Their products are similar – users “check in” to places they visit. Friends can see where they are, and vice versa.

This clearly seems to be a winning model. Mobile social networks have been evolving briskly over the last couple of years, and the location based check in model seems to be what people want. Both services are expanding quickly, and passionate users chirp constantly about the services.

Facebook and MySpace continue to sit on the sidelines and take a wait and see approach. That’s probably fine for Facebook (here’s why). But MySpace doesn’t have the luxury of waiting. One strong strategic move they could make immediately is to jump headfirst into this space, damn the privacy issues. MySpace may even want to do this under a separate brand. But whatever – getting their bands and artists to use the feature will lure in lots of others. This is a wide open space. The model that users want seems to be set. It’s time to move.

Here’s GoWalla in action:

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Spinvox, Spinvox, Spinvox. It promised so much but in the end delivered only so much. Like a latter-day Boo.com it hyped its magical voice-to-text service to the stars, apparently built on highly advanced technology, but in the end it has not lived up to the expectations it went all out to trumpet.

Nuance, possibly the leader in speech-to-text processing, and with 40+ carrier relationship, is reportedly picking up Spinvox in a $150 million sale which might be completed before Christmas. But there was no source on the Sunday Times story and Spinvox tells us they aren’t commenting at all. The Sunday Times is often used as a vehicle to float ’sale rumours’ which are actually designed to flush out more bidders.

This story could have been different, but the exit route to another likely suitor was cut off when SimulScribe, the ’scrappy’ voicemail transcription company, effectively exited in an exclusive deal with Ditech Networksthat worth as much as $17 million back in September. It could be argued that SimulScribe played it right, setting expectations at a realisable level and executing on that promise.

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Last month Google unveiled enhancements to Google Translate. Among the new features was a simple text-to-speech function. You can try it out, or watch this video to see how it works (skip to 0:45).

There’s no official API for the text-to-speech service. But Weston Ruter noticed that anyone can access the service in the same way Google does: “Looking at the Firebug Net panel for where this TTS data was coming from, I saw that the speech audio is in MP3 format and is queried via a simple HTTP GET (REST) request: http://translate.google.com/translate_tts?tl=en&q=text”

Translation: just change the URL to whatever you want it to say and you’ll get back a MP3 file. Example: copy the URL http://translate.google.com/translate_tts?q=I+love+techcrunch into your browser.

This is English only for now, and its limited to 100 characters. But unless Google shuts this down, third party applications can now use this in any creative way they want. Have at it.

Via Ajaxian.

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Zynga founder Mark Pincus is the final speaker at Y Combinator Startup School 2009. My notes on his talk are below.

Pincus kicked off his talk by asked the audience how many wanted to become a great entrepreneurs (much of the room raised their hand). But fewer raised their hand about becoming a world class CEO, which is something Pincus says they need to address.

Out of college, Pincus says he went into banking and then business school, after which he worked in major corporations. He says that sometimes entrepreneurs are born after finding that nothing lese works for them, explaining “I got kicked out of some of the best companies in America”.

Pincus’s first lesson: You should set a goal for what you want to accomplish. Pincus says he was Fred Wilson’s first consumer deal (”he loaned me $250k and gave me four months to do something”). He started FreeLoader. The company was acquired, but the CEO of the company that bought it “had a nervous breakdown”. At this point Pincus says he had his ‘greencard’ to be an entrepreneur.

Pincus said that after selling FreeLoader, he had some downtime — ”And then you get a new group of friends… A ghetto version of the show Entourage” — friends go out on Monday night at 1:30. But that gets old after a couple months.”

Pincus then started another company, called Support.com. “We created this service that nobody wanted, figured out quickly that nobody wanted it.” Pincus says that when you have a friend who has a ‘hairbrained’ idea that they think nobody understands yet — you may want to have an intervention. If you have an idea that can’t get funding, it may be a good idea, but it may be a bad idea. “What I would do is find five friends, give them your pitch, write a powerpoint as if you had $30 million in funding, and come back and tell me here’s what my service will be when this is spent.”

Support.com had core technology that let you clone old PC into new PC called MoveIt. Interviewed people on the street, and they wanted a way to move kids’ games to their new computer. So they actually had something people wanted, even if it wasn’t the core focus of the company.

Pincus says the second lesson he’s learned: not having a clear goal when you set out leads to death by a thousand compromises.

Death by a thousand compromises
Pincus says there’s no such thing as an independly controled company. Your VCs get some board seats, they say let’s both select an independent guy. You find out at the first board meeting the independent guy looks to the investors and says “it’s their money”. Someone else is running your company, and because he’s backing you and he’s a first time netrepreneur, you’re not getting the head of the firm. First day as the VC, and they’re proving themselves on you. And junior VCs are junior for a reason. If you have a conversation with John Doerr, he’ll say yeah, let’s do that. Junior guy is more nervous about the downside. So when you’re successful, they say this company is so valuable, you’ve never run a big company any more, so they talk about hiring a COO. Then you find out there is no world class COO who would work for a 20-something year old (except for Mark Zuckerberg). So then you have to make them CEO. Death by a thousand compromises. Pincus says after an ordeal like this, he was left with a public company that was profitable but he wasn’t fulfilled.

Pincus says he then went to Tony Robins (seriously). Attendees at the conference consisted of 4000 out-of-work realtors. But it works. Robbins says to set very high goals but take any path to get there.

With Zynga, Pincus says he wanted to make a company that put out a consumer service that would be around and would matter for a long time. As Tony Robins says, “Control Your Destiny”. In 2007, he says you don’t have the luxury of just building a feature, you have to build the whole thing.

Referring back to his issues with the board, If you’re profitable, you can control your board. He says we negotiate for the wrong thing because we don’t know what our goals are. “Who gives a shit what your valuation is? At the end of the day your valuation will be more impacted by a board made up by a bunch of old white men who show up once a month for half a day. It’s a lot easier if you just tell them what you’re going to do”.

Second Thing.
“You ought to all aspire to be a great CEO”. When you have a big company, you need to either find someone else to be the CEO, or you’re the CEO. He says the odds are more in your favor if you go to a company where you go to a company like Facebook, Zappos, or Zynga, where we help create CEOs.

On Fake CEOs:
Pincus says a fake CEO is someone who goes out, does talks and photoshoots, while something at the company is “on fire”. Says that he was supposed to be doing a talk at Harvard Business School, but canceled because he had to be there for the launch of Facebook’s changing News Feed.

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