Samsung’s Exynos 5-based Chromebook may have been available since last October, but how about one equipped with WiMAX radio? Graced with the presence of Google and Samsung reps in Kuala Lumpur (including a video message from Google SVP Sundar Pichai), today Malaysian carrier Yes 4G unveiled this rather special laptop for the local consumers. In fact, we should have seen this coming as Google’s official blog did hint this last month, but we failed to catch that blurred “Yes 4G” logo on the laptop in the blog’s photo.
As Google mentioned, the ultimate goal here is to help transform Malaysia’s education using the Chromebook. And now we know that this ambition will be backed by Yes 4G’s rapidly growing WiMAX network — from the initial 1,200 base stations in 2010 to today’s 4,000, covering 85 percent of the peninsula; and the carrier will expand into the eastern side with 700 more sites by the end of this year. This is especially important for the rural areas, where many schools still lack access to water and electricity. As a partner of the Malaysian Ministry of Education’s 1BestariNet project, Yes 4G’s parent company YTL Communications has so far ensured that 7,000 local state schools are covered by its WiMAX network, with the remaining 3,000 to be connected over the next six months.
Source: Yes
Indoor mapping software startup 
As a fourth generation venture investor, Adam Draper was pretty much predestined to work with startups. The son of Tim Draper, the founder of global VC firm Draper Fisher Jurveston, Adam has made it his mission to do everything in his power to help entrepreneurs bring their ideas to life — without relying on his family name to do so. After taking the plunge as an entrepreneur himself, co-founding a capital raising and trading platform and an equity crowdfunding portal, the 26-year-old again finds himself back in the Draper wheelhouse: Early-stage finance.
For the past several years, my New Year’s resolution has been some version of “cook more often” or “try a new recipe every week.” But it never really lasts. As much as I love the act of actually cooking, so much about it is a huge hassle — choosing a recipe, shopping for all the ingredients (and paying for a whole bottle of a spice I only need a tablespoon of), ending up with a bunch of leftovers. 
Boston-based Localytics is fleshing out its mobile app analytics and marketing platform in a major way today with a variety of new features to help not just with customer acquisition, but also with monitoring and maintaining customer relationships over the lifetime of an app. The three big new areas Localytics now addresses with its platform are Lifetime Value Tracking, Customer Acquisition Management and Real-Time Funnel Management, all of which serve to help determine long-term engagement value.
Jolicloud, which last October pivoted yet again — to become Jolidrive: a “entry point”/dashboard for accessing third party cloud services like Dropbox, Google Drive, Box and also social accounts like Vimeo and YouTube — has taken the next obvious step on this new product path and added a search function to flesh out its role as a cloud content (re)discovery service.
The team behind mobile video app Socialcam just keeps on trucking. The company, which is now part of Autodesk, is releasing a new version of its app today, adding a bunch of features that users have asked for, like expanded profile pages, as well as the ability to switch back and forth between front- and rear-facing cameras and hashtags and @ mentions that actually do stuff. It’s been nearly a year since Socialcam was acquired in a deal that was worth about $ 60 million. Since then, the team has added a few members, boosting its ranks from four to seven. And that team continues to iterate on the app, posting eight updates across its iOS and Android apps since acquisition, some bigger than others. That said, Socialcam co-founder Michael Seibel wants to increase the rate at which the company puts out updates, getting it back to its pre-acquisition pace of an update every three weeks or so. With that in mind, the company just issued a pretty major update today which answer some of the demands its users had from previous version. That includes better support for hashtags and @mentions of other users. See, people were hashtagging their stuff all the time in Socialcam, but being able to search or follow or click through those hashtags wasn’t as fully built out as some would like. So users can now search via hashtag, and hashtags are now clickable. Socialcam has also added autocomplete for hashtags and @mentions, so users can get at what they want sooner. And if what they want to get at is another user page, Socialcam has given them a little more to look at. According to Seibel, the company found that its users weren’t just leveraging the app to share their videos with other social networks, but were actually using it as its own little social network, following and interacting with the other folks there. One of the requests the team got was to expand user profiles. So it did that, giving them more that they could do to express themselves and tell strangers on the platform who they are and why they should be followed. Socialcam also has added the ability to switch between front- and rear-facing cameras on its iOS app, allowing users to shoot a video intro with the front-facing cam, and then switch to the other one to show people what’s going on
Some people believe that Google’s practices when it come to search are mystical and unfair, or sometimes evil, but what the company wants to do is surface the most important information for you when you perform a task on its most important product. With the introduction of Knowledge Graph last year, Google started showing information on the right-hand side of search results to help you figure out if you’re searching for the right thing, be it a person, place or thing. Today, Google announced that it’s now filling up its Knowledge Graph with information about non-profits, which will help people find the right organization that they’d like to check out and potentially donate to. In its announcement, Google said that this is still in its early roll-out phase, with more information being added all of the time: We’ve just started to add information about nonprofits to the Knowledge Graph. When you search for a nonprofit organization on Google.com, you will start to see information to the right side of the search results that highlights the nonprofit’s financials, cause, and recent Google+ posts. Start following the organization on Google+ directly from the panel by clicking the Follow button. To learn more about related nonprofits, click on one of the organizations under “People also search for” and a carousel of similar organizations will appear at the top of the search results. Over time, we’ll continue to work on bringing more nonprofit information into your search experience. In addition to key information about non-profits, including their category and tax deductibility code, Google is promoting their Google+ pages as well. This means that Google+ could immediately become a hot spot for non-profits to find new volunteers, avenues for fundraising and more importantly, awareness for their campaigns and causes. While all known non-profits aren’t available in Knowledge Graph as of yet, it looks like most of the big ones are. You’ll notice that Google is also publishing the last Google+ post from the organization, allowing people to jump right into a conversation: This is yet another example of how Google has strategically, and with precision, started to stitch together all of its products to create a world where people can spend just a little bit of time and get better results and information quicker. It’s also an example of how Google+ has become the connective tissue to make all of these connections happen.
Jolla, the Finnish startup that carried the MeeGo torch out of Nokia in order to light a fire under its own smartphone OS: Sailfish, has taken the next step in its platform play, launching SDK installers to encourage developers to get building native Sailfish apps. It’s offering graphical installers for Windows, OS X and Linux (in 32 bit and 64 bit flavours).
It’s recently been very quiet around Delicious, the social bookmarking service Yahoo bought in 2005 and then sold to AVOS in 2011. Back then, the AVOS team said it was relaunching Delicious “back to beta,” but Delicious hasn’t made all that many waves since then, nor has it added all that many features to the relaunched service. But after four months of slumber, the Delicious blog sprung into action today and launched a few new features that could make the site a bit more interesting for those of us who long ago abandoned social bookmarking for social networks like Twitter and Facebook. Indeed, today’s update is all about Twitter and Facebook: Delicious added the ability to log in with your credentials for those two social networks and connect. It’s now easier to use Delicious to automatically save all those links you share on Facebook and shared and favorited on Twitter directly on Delicious, too. Delicious acquired the link-saving startup Trunk.ly to power this feature in November 2011 and turned it on for Twitter last March and for Facebook in July. Using Twitter and Facebook logins isn’t exactly innovative, but it does point toward a more social future for Delicious, especially in combination with the new “Friend Finder” tool that lets you friend and follow people you know on Twitter and Facebook. The team also made other small improvements – the bookmarklet and site now load faster, for example, but the main feature Delicious power users will surely appreciate is that every link now includes a “first saver” attribution. I’m not sure that any of this will really rescue Delicious from its current obscurity. Saving the links you share on social networks doesn’t exactly feel like the hot new thing, after all. It’s good to see a sign of life out of Delicious, however, and if Digg is still around and kicking, why shouldn’t del.icio.us be, too?
Encoding.com is trying to add a few features that will set it apart from the competition. One of these features is dynamic text overlays, which was showed off as part of a Google Hangout campaign late last year. For the Google campaign, the dynamic text overlay was part of a custom workflow that Encoding.com worked on to enable the custom message.
Boxee TV has a new firmware update making its way out to its connected set-top boxes this week, which includes a number of big improvements including the addition of DLNA streaming. Spotted by GigaOM, the update also adds 3D streaming of content from Vudu, the video streaming service from Walmart, and changes to its TV guide and notification settings.
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