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Posts Tagged ‘sister’

The Vizit photo frame is an interesting twist on conventional photo frames.

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Quick hands on with the Vizit cellular connected touchscreen photo frame

Without Rooney, England is doomed.

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Spy report: EA Sports’ FIFA World Cup 2010

Sir Tim Berners-Lee speaks at TED2010 about the value of open data.

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Tim Berners-Lee advocates for open data

Short version: Gateway’s SX2840 is an ideal computer for someone who needs a good basic computer. It feels fast enough that it’s not annoying, and it’s perfect for pretty much everything except hardcore gaming. I’d even go so far as to say that it’d work great as an HTPC, because it plays back HD video with no problems.

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Review: Gateway SX2840

New Enterprise Associates (NEA) this morning announced (PDF) the official close of its thirteenth fund, which it began investing in May 2009. At nearly $2.5 billion, it is comparable in size to NEA’s prior fund, which closed in 2006 and was just over $2.5 billion.

According to NEA, its fund XIII represents an estimated 17 percent of all U.S. venture capital funds raised in 2009 and is the largest single fund raised since 2007. The new capital commitments brings the venture capital firm’s total to more than $11 billion across all of its funds.

NEA, which has subsidiaries in both China and India, primarily invests in healthcare, energy, consumer and enterprise technology companies. The firm ranked number 4 on our list of most active VCs, which we published in October 2009 on our sister site TechCrunch Trends.

Some of its portfolio companies that will likely be most familiar to TechCrunch readers are Loopt, 23andMe, Vuze, Engine Yard and Millennial Media.

Its most recent investments were GroupOn (our coverage) and Playdom (our coverage), and it’s worth noting that NEA was the sole backer of Teracent, which was recently acquired by Google for an undisclosed sum after raising just south of $6 million.

(Press release via peHUB)

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Andy Rubin, pictured above surrounded by press after the Nexus One event today, is the guy who founded Android and sold it to Google in 2005. And he’s starting to remind me a little of another product fanatic, Steve Jobs.

Everyone knows about Jobs’ amazing ability to build hit products and disrupt entire industries. I wrote extensively about this in What If Steve Jobs Hadn’t Returned To Apple In 1997?. Jobs is all about the product. Every last detail. And it shows. He’s disrupted the mobile phone, music, film and television industries, and we haven’t even mentioned the Macs yet.

But Jobs is also notoriously touchy and difficult to work with. He demands perfection and doesn’t really work well with others. And Jobs is distrustful of the press. Apple’s PR group is mostly there to not return calls.

We forgive him all that, of course. Because he’s changing the world, and forces competitors to do better just to try to keep up. The world, particularly the tech world, is a far more colorful place because of Jobs. There is no one at Apple who has the product vision to push that company forward once he steps down. He’s the Alexander the Great of today’s tech world. And he’s also able to captivate a crowd when he’s on stage.

Rubin isn’t Steve Jobs. He doesn’t have the product track record that Jobs has (no one in the world does). And Rubin is shy on stage – he doesn’t make any real effort to win over the crowd. There was no “and one last thing” line at today’s Nexus One launch by Rubin. Only Steve Jobs can really pull that off.

But Rubin is a product fanatic in the same way that Jobs is. The NY Times did a good overview of Rubin in 2005. One line about Rubin, a former Apple engineer and cofounder of WebTV and Danger, stuck with me from that article: “Mr. Rubin is a proven member of an earlier group of engineers-turned-entrepreneurs who have a passion for building complete digital systems.”

I’ll say. A lot of credit for the Nexus One goes to his senior team, particularly Mario Queiroz and Erick Tseng (two people Google put on stage today). But the vision for the Nexus One was all Rubin, we keep hearing from people at Google. And he wouldn’t compromise, even after it was clear Google would miss their original deadline of shipping the Nexus One in time for the 2009 holiday rush. “Rubin kept saying it has to be thinner,” mumbled one tired team member to me after the event, “so we made it thinner.”

He has incredible power within the Android group at Google, and even VPs at Google there make sure not to cross him. People who work with him have told me of his amazing attention to detail and his unbending demands that a product be perfect before it goes out the door. A lot of that shows in the Nexus One, Google’s first complete end to end hardware and software system.

Rubin has many of the same personality traits as Jobs. He’s a product visionary and fanatic who likes the dictatorial style of product development. He’s not great with people, and doesn’t deal well with the press. At today’s Nexus One event you could see his barely contained frustration at the questions fired off at him during the Q&A session. “I’m just not going to say anything else about that” was one quip he fired off after a reporter kept asking the same question over and over. Jobs, of course, doesn’t do Q&As.

And that’s just fine with me. I don’t care if the people we cover are likable, or like me. Being affable or loquacious isn’t a job requirement for Awesome Product Guy. You just have to have a strong vision, be unwilling to bend, and have the means of following through with that product to launch.

Like Jobs, Rubin has known failure. He’s even been fired from his own company, Danger. But like Jobs, he went on to bigger and better things. For Jobs it was NeXT and Pixar, then back at Apple. For Rubin, it was Android.

Is the Nexus One as disruptive as the iPhone? No. Apple started this party and the Nexus One is part of that same revolution. But it’s disruptive in different ways, and its openness (and paring with Google Voice) is pretty exciting. And I get the feeling that his team is just getting started with this whole Android thing.

Ten years from now we’ll look back. Rubin may just be another exec at another big company. Or he may be something more. Heck, he may even be running Apple. His personality would fit right in.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Tokyo-based Kenko-Tokina , normally known for its camera accessories, has announced a cute Disney-themed digital camera [JP] for the Japanese market today. Spec-wise, this 8MP point-and-shoot camera isn’t anything special, but that’s what you’d expect from a camera whose case shows Mickey Mouse giving Minnie a bucket of hearts.

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Kenko-Tokina’s super-cute Mickey Mouse camera

Here’s something yourself or your sister might be particularly interested in: A digital camera that helps you to pretty up pictures taken with it on the go. The so-called Love-Digi Moving Photo Camera [JP] is made by Japanese toymaker Takara Tomy and based on the cultural phenomenon of Purikura , photo booths in Japan that especially teenage girls use to create decorated snaps of themselves.

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Love-Digi Moving Photo Camera is a portable photo booth – almost (video)

It’s a good time to be an airport Wi-Fi advertiser. According to a study just released by JiWire, the folks behind a lot of airport Wi-Fi, most people that use airport W-iFi are loaded and spend a good amount of time online while waiting for their flight. This means, of course, that Mr

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Airport Wi-Fi users tend to be well-off, rich folk

Today’s another big day in gaming, friends.

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Another big day in gaming: Assassin’s Creed II, Left 4 Dead 2 & Tony Hawk Part 900