Spongecell, a startup that places rich media ads in display advertisements, has raised a new round of financing led by Eric Schmidt and Jim Pallotta, Chairman and Managing Director of Raptor Group. Participating in the round are Brian Rooney, Board Member of the Pittsburgh Steelers, and Silverhaze Partners. The amount of the round was...
The NHK Science Technology Research Laboratories is coming up with technology that automatically generates animated sign language in order to expand sign language in news broadcasts. The automatic sign language translation system converts strings of words using Japanese as well as sign language sample texts. While subtitles works for people who understand Japanese, sign...
Social photo app Instagram pushed out a new update today on the iPhone. The first thing you notice is that uploads are a lot faster. Speed, quite frankly, is one of Instagram’s competitive advantages. But the update also includes some new features, the most important of which is the ability to see all the...
TechWeb reports that according to informed sources, Sina Weibo is “actively preparing” to release its microblogging platform in English to go directly head on against Twitter in about 2-3 months. Earlier this year, Sina has already announced its plans to monetize its hugely popular microblogging service and since then has been very active with rolling out new features. Probably the...
Kickstarter, the crowd funding platform, is changing how we create and consume things. The platform has been responsible for many projects but it was a handful of projects, such as LunaTik and TikTok (both made kits to turn the iPod Nano into a wrist watch), that put the platform on the map for good. Those...
Popular iPhone photo sharing app Instagram captured the hearts of nearly five million users this year despite, or perhaps because of, a surprising lack of features. The super-simple photo app let you apply filters and post out to other networks. It didn’t let you do much more than that. The company has slowly added...
In a week where U.S. news coverage was dominated by an inappropriate tweet from a congressperson’s Twitter account, maybe it’s worth taking a moment or two to think about your own personal social media policy. What are you doing to avoid landing in the same soup that Rep. Anthony Weiner has been sloshing around...
After last week’s bad economic data and market swoon, here’s a useful look (via Goldman Sachs) at how things are holding up. None of the 10 market sectors rallied, but tech was the only one that stayed flat. What’s interesting is that “defensives” like healthcare, utilities, and consumer staples, were among the big losers....
IMAP4 (Internet Mail Access Protocol) is a little discussed but widely used protocol for accessing and managing email. As it turns out, IMAP is also a great way to deliver information to mobile applications, by repurposing mobile IMAP clients for use in a wide range of mobile applications. While this is a bit of...
Americans are using Internet and TV together more and more, according to a recent study. The same “second screen” phenomenon is happening in Latin America: TV viewers live-comment the shows they are watching. Here is how newly launched startup Comenta.TV plans to tap into this new segment. What is Comenta.TV Launched only a couple weeks...