Australian startup, Airtasker, is keen to expand out of its home country into Southeast Asia, which it says hasn’t been touched by large competitors yet. The year-old startup provides job matching for freelancers and employers, similar to what oDesk and Elance do. For its first steps outside of Australia, its first port of call will be Singapore, where it wants to hire two country managers. Airtasker joins a scene that already has a few huge competitors. oDesk, for example, has been around since 2005. Last year, the company raised $ 15 million, making its total funding $ 45 million to date. The site processes $ 300 million in jobs on an annual basis. Some early oDesk employees also founded Rev.com, which in March announced $ 4.5 million in Series A funding. Another big competitor, Elance, raised $ 16 million in funding early last year as well, as its business has continued to grow in the past two years. 650,000 new job postings were listed on the site in 2011, it said. But big as these sites are, they don’t seem to have made a huge impact on freelancers in Southeast Asia. A quick search for freelancers in Singapore on oDesk showed 248 listings out of 742,113. Hong Kong showed a dismal 84, Kuala Lumpur 7 and Bangkok 31. While it appears indeed untouched by the large sites, it could just mean that the freelancing scene is a lot less vibrant in Asia, with the majority of workers preferring full-time jobs. It could also be that fewer freelancers rely on online matching sites to get their jobs, as well. Airtasker’s founder and CEO, Tim Fung, said temp jobs in the region are less organized into verticals. He said some common jobs in Asia include handing out flyers at a train station, or a one-day PA. These can’t really be categorized by industry, and Airtasker has organized its job ads and job seeker profiles in a broader fashion, so that more matches can be made by both sides. The bulk of Airtasker’s workers, for now, are based in Australia, and its upward trajectory does indicate some sort of pent-up demand on the freelancing scene. Airtasker now processes about $ 120,000 worth of jobs per month. Fung hinted that Airtasker will announce a partnership with a global jobs network soon. “I think that’s an indication that the larger ‘mainstream’ job scene is taking part-time job listings more seriously,” he
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Tag Archives: wants
Airtasker Wants To Be oDesk Of Southeast Asia
DirecTV wants to buy Hulu, again
The satellite TV provider is eyeing the video streaming service, according to news reports. [Read more]
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Yahoo Wants To Buy Everyone, Tumblr Edition
The first rule of being cool is not telling people you want to be cool. Yahoo is not following this rule, with its M&A team in full pray-and-spray acquisition mode post-Marissa Mayer hire, hitting on everything that walks, or at least has traction.
Deals I have heard rumors Yahoo was trying to get into over the past couple of months: Foursquare (at an $ 800 million asking price). Path (at a $ 2 billion asking price). Pinterest. Hulu. Zynga. Daily Motion. And at a smaller scale: Gdgt. Wavii. Media Ocean (?). A spate of others. And now Tumblr. “Literally they talk to everyone,” said one person familiar with the matter on the matter.
Google Wants to Help Apps Track You
Singapore’s SingTel Wants To Pump Another $1.6B Into Startup Investments
Singapore’s largest telecoms provider, SingTel, plans to set aside $ 1.6 billion (S$ 2 billion) over the next three years for startup acquisitions. Like those it has made in recent years, these are expected to be in the digital media space. All of these can be tracked back to the major restructuring of SingTel’s business arms last year, where it divided itself into three pillars called Consumer, ICT and Digital Life. The first two focus on consumer and enterprise segments, respectively, but the Digital Life arm is most representative of the change. The division was set up as a reaction to over-the-top competition from third party content providers, and SingTel said Digital Life was going to compete head on, providing smart TV, digital magazines and local content. Some of acquisitions so far include restaurant review sites, Hungrygowhere and Eatability, and photo app Pixable. SingTel has also been bullish as a VC. In 2010, it set up a separate venture arm called Innov8 to specifically look at acquisitions that would boost its current play in the telecoms arena. Innov8 was set up with an initial fund size of $ 160 million (S$ 200 million), and has since acquired firms like mobile ad company Amobee. Innov8 has also raised rounds in startups like mobile ad exchange Nexage and Chinese game publisher Yodo. SingTel runs telecoms operations in other countries in the region, like Optus in Australia. It has significant stakes in other carriers like Globe in The Philippines (44 percent), Bharti in India (32 percent) and Telkomsel in Indonesia (35 percent). Altogether, its operations in the region cover about 400 million mobile subscribers.
TechCrunch
Blinkbuggy Wants To Reinvent The “Baby Book” For Parents To Capture Memories Online
For generations in the past, parents have carefully put together “baby books” that capture the first years of a baby’s life in photos, hand prints and more. My mother created one for me, and it’s something that I treasure. But in the world’s digital age, the photos and memories of our babies are captured most often on mobile phones. Any paper is stored in a file cabinet or thrown away. And there hasn’t been a product that is specifically tailored towards recreating the baby book online—until now. Enter Blinkbuggy, a new startup from a Googler that wants to help moms and dads create virtual baby books.
TechCrunch
Congress Wants Federal Government To Sell 1755-1780 MHz Spectrum Band
GovTechGuy writes “With next year’s reverse auction of TV spectrum not expected to sate the wireless industry’s growing demand for mobile broadband, lawmakers are turning up the heat on the Obama administration to auction the 1755-1780 MHz band, which is considered especially desirable for mobile phone use. However, the Pentagon and other federal agencies are already using those airwaves for everything from flying drones and surveillance to satellites and air combat training. They say it would take ten years and $ 18 billion just to vacate the band so it can be sold.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
PayPal wants to get rid of passwords in favor of biometric security
While passwords are the way of the land on the internet, PayPal’s chief information security officer Michael Barrett says that passwords and PINs are obsolete and we need a new standard for security on computers and the internet. Barrett thinks that the next step is fingerprint scanners, which he believes will debut on smartphones at
California Lawmaker Wants 3-D Printers To Be Regulated
New submitter phrackthat writes with news that California State Senator Leland Yee (D-S.F.) says he wants regulations to track who owns and uses 3-D printers. Yee’s comments come in response to the recent news of Defense Distributed’s successful test-firing of a 3-D printed gun. “He’s concerned that just about anyone with access to those cutting-edge printers can arm themselves. ‘Terrorists can make these guns and do some horrible things to an individual and then walk away scott-free, and that is something that is really dangerous,’ said Yee. He said while this new technology is impressive, it must be regulated when it comes to making guns. He says background checks, requiring serial numbers and even registering them could be part of new legislation that he says will protect the public. Yee added, ‘This particular gun has no trace whatsoever.’”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
PriceHub Wants To Tell You How Much Your Car Is Really Worth, With Data To Prove It
How much is your car worth?
It’s an easy enough question to answer. Punch in the details at Kelley Blue Book and bam — question answered, ego stoked (or not.)
But how do they know how much it’s worth? For the most part, even the tried-and-true sources like the ol’ Blue Book are kind of a black box.
PriceHub wants to make the process more transparent.
TechCrunch
Acer confirms 10-inch Iconia A3 tablet, wants to sell 10 million slates this year
Acer’s senior VP Scott Lin recently confirmed that a new 10-inch Iconia A3 tablet will arrive this summer and and was quick to include it in some very ambitious sales plans. The device (not pictured) has yet to be priced or spec’d (or seen) yet, but Lin hopes that it’ll make up some of the 10 million slates the company’s looking to sell in 2013. He also announced a refresh for the $ 150 Iconia B1 this summer with a dual-core CPU, updated design and 1GB of ram, and said that 1.5 million units of that model have shipped so far this year. The company would like to move another 1.5 million by year’s end along with 5 million of the recently announced 8-inch Iconia A1 tabs and 2 million Iconia A3s to make up the balance. Considering that competitor Asus sold 3 million tablets in Q1 and has the hit Nexus 7 to peddle, it seems a lofty goal for Acer — especially since it only reluctantly leaped into tablets not so long ago.
Via: Android Beat
Source: Focus Taiwan
Designers Rejoice, Froont Wants To Keep Developers Out Of The Responsive Web Design Process
Inventure-backed Froont has launched in public beta today with a web-based tool that aims to make it easy for designers to create, prototype and share responsive website designs, without the need to code. Using a visual, largely drag ‘n’ drop interface that creates responsive CSS/HTML on the fly, it aims to replace the somewhat arcane process where a designer hands off a Photoshop mockup for a developer to interpret. In fact, Froont offers the potential to leave developers out of the design (and even prototyping) process altogether, which in some cases may be a very good thing.
TechCrunch
LG Working On A Nexus 5, Wants Deeper Partnerships On TVs And Glass, Report Claims
LG is an Android smartphone OEM that, like many others, finds itself in the shadow of Samsung. But it scored an impressive hit with the Nexus 4, the $ 300 unlocked Google-branded Android reference phone it released last year, and according to the Korea Times, it’s already working on a follow-up with the search giant.
TechCrunch
Startup Common Application Wants To Make Startup Job Applications More Efficient
Startups still have a hard time finding the right applicants for their jobs. During our Disrupt NY 2013 hackathon, Codecademy engineer Bob Ren wrote a little web app that takes the Common Application for college admission as its inspiration. Just like high school students can use the Common Application to apply to multiple colleges simultaneously, Startup Common Application will take your application and then submit it to multiple startups. Large companies typically have a huge pipeline with job prospects, but startups “naturally suffer from not having the big pipelines that big companies have,” Ren told me – and for a small startup, it’s even harder to find the right applicants. Currently, startups either rely on email, Job Score or Resumator, but the system is still very inefficient, especially for the applicants. You often spend hours getting your applications ready and submitted, but a system like Startup Common Application could just automate all of this for you (and you don’t even have to pretend that you really personalized the system). Common Startup Application runs on top of Heroku and Ren is working on a number of scripts that will take his users’ data and then auto-submit it to more startups. In the spirit of the Hackathon, Ren coded until 6 a.m. and then slept an hour before getting ready for his demo this afternoon. Obviously, this is still a hack, so Ren will surely have to work on the design a bit more, but he’s definitely tackling an interesting problem. Given that he can automate much of it, what he really needs right now, of course, is support for as many startups as possible, but there are some pretty obvious ways he could monetize this service if he decides to continue working on it.
TechCrunch
Pay With Bits Wants To Be The Square For Bitcoin
Considering the gold rush around peer-to-peer currency Bitcoin, it’s not surprising that one of the hackers at the Disrupt NY hackathon created an application around the currency. Pay With Bits was to be a Square for Bitcoin. The startup essentially allows Bitcoins to be transfered between parties via their mobile phones.
TechCrunch
Disrupt NY 2013 Hackathon Team Wants To Build A WebRTC-Based Pandora For Exercise
The Disrupt NY 2013 Hackathon has been underway for a few hours now and we’re already seeing a bunch of cool projects. Team Geem is building what it calls a “Pandora for Exercise.” The service, which will hopefully be ready in time to be demoed tomorrow, will create exercise programs that are tailored for the individual user. The usual exercise DVDs, Geem believes, are just too boring and repetitive, so a web-based exercise service that’s fully customized can help break through that routine. Also, unlike DVDs, Geem could offer users a wider choice of options, so if you want to do some cardio and work on your abs, and also do a bit of yoga, Geem will have you covered. Users, the team tells me, will be able to watch pre-recorded videos, but the cool part of the service is also that it will enable ad-hoc classes that teachers can set up through the service. While I was talking to them, Geem was looking at using TokBox’s OpenTok WebRTC platform for its service. What’s nice about this is that users could also beam their video over to the instructor, so if you just can’t get that crane pose right in your yoga class, the teacher can see what’s wrong and hopefully help you from crashing into the ground in your living room. The team also plans to use the Django framework and possibly build a Roku app to get their service into the living room. It wouldn’t be 2013 if the five-member team, including Mina Azib, Sven Hermann, Livio Dalloro, Alan Johnson, Lauren Dalloro and Guanglei Xiong, wasn’t also thinking about adding some social features to its service. Users, they say, will be able to see what classes their friends are attending and receive notifications when their favorite instructors are about to teach a class (with Facebook being the social backend for the service). Users, of course, will also be able to rate their instructors. Most of the team members currently work for Siemens, and Alan Johnson is working on his own startup, Breakrs, a gamified platform for music discovery, which is currently in beta.
TechCrunch
Politician Wants Sci-fi To Be Mandatory In School
Avantare writes “The first sci-fi novel I read was A Wrinkle in Time; the next was Dune. Why don’t more people read these extraordinarily imaginative books? Delegate Ray Canterbury, who represents Greenbrier County in southern WV, wants to help with that. Canterbury introduced House Bill 2983, which reads, ‘To stimulate interest in math and science among students in the public schools of this state, the State Board of Education shall prescribe minimum standards by which samples of grade-appropriate science fiction literature are integrated into the curriculum of existing reading, literature or other required courses for middle school and high school students.’ For decades, walking around with a paperback sci-fi novel in your back pocket at school was the quickest way to find yourself permanently excluded from the cool-kid clique. But what if it wasn’t just the geeks who read Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke? What if science fiction was mandatory reading for all students?”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
UK regulator wants white space wireless service in 2014, starts trials this fall
While there have been white space test runs in the UK, these were private trials that weren’t going to get the ball rolling without government help. Thankfully, local regulator Ofcom is of a like mind. It now plans a trial for data on the in-between frequencies this fall, with full-fledged service going live as soon as 2014. The agency expects to settle on the final locations for the pilot after it chooses partners. No, Ofcom can’t guarantee that all the stars will align for rural broadband or other long-range wireless projects — but its involvement at least means those stars are within reach.
Filed under: Wireless, Networking
Via: GigaOM
Source: Ofcom
The Amazon Rainforest Wants Its TLD Back From Amazon.com
terrancem writes “The Seattle-based Amazon.com has applied for its brand to be a generic top-level domain name (.amazon), but South American governments argue this would prevent the use of this internet address for environmental protection, the promotion of indigenous rights and other public interest uses. Along with dozens of other disputed claims to names including “.patagonia” and “.shangrila”, the issue cuts to the heart of debates about the purpose and governance of the internet.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Facebook wants advertisers to pay $1m a day to display their video ads
Jomi’s Smart Water Bottle Sleeve-Plus-App Wants To Track & Chart Your Liquid Intake To Make You Drink More
Move over HAPIfork. Estonian startup Jomi Interactive is cooking up a pair of smart devices that will remind people to drink more water. Or at least whatever liquid/poison of choice you put in your water bottle. The aim, says the startup, is to encourage healthy behaviour and counteract the mild dehydration we are all apparently afflicted with.
TechCrunch
Obama Wants Far More Money for Existing Technologies than for Developing New Ones
Does it make sense to spend so much on already commercialized technology?
According to the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, President Obama’s budget has nearly $ 13 billion set aside for energy-related spending–if you look just at the amount allocated for key R&D programs at the Department of Energy along with spending on tax incentives (there’s more if, for example, you include funding for Department of Defense related programs). Most of that money–$ 7.5 billion—is going to tax breaks of one sort of another. That is, money that goes to deploying technology we already have. The rest—about $ 5 billion–is for R&D and demonstration of new technology.
Oracle wants to be easier to work with, Mark Hurd says
Oracle's sales force isn't usually seen as the easiest to work with, with customers bombarded by multiple account representatives from different product areas.
Computerworld News
Google Wants To Operate .Search As A “Dotless” Domain, Plans To Open .Cloud, .Blog And .App To Others
If it gets it, Google wants to turn .search into a “dotless domain,” the company told ICANN a few days ago. Last year, Google applied to manage the .app, .blog, .cloud and .search generic top-level domain (gTLD) names as part of a major expansion of the domain-name system. ICANN, which is managing this expansion, hasn’t awarded any of the gTLDs yet, and the whole program remains controversial. But in May, Google sent a letter to ICANN telling the organization that it would soon provide some specific details about its plans for these top-level domain names. Now, Google has done so through its Charleston Road Registry subsidiary (we have embedded the full letter below). At the time, it looked like Google was ready to open up these gTLDs to the public and wasn’t just planning on using them for its own services. In its letter to ICANN, Google now confirms that it is working with “the relevant communities related to .blog and .cloud to develop technical standards relating to the operation of those top-level domains.” Google’s Plans For A Dotless .Search The most interesting plan here is to use .search to operate a redirect service on the “on the ‘dotless’ .search domain (http://search/) that, combined with a simple technical standard, will allow a consistent query interface across firms that provide search functionality, and will enable users to easily conduct searches with firms that provide the search functionality that they designate as their preference.” Dotless domains (think http://example and email addresses like mail@example) are something ICANN has discussed for a while now and that security experts are not in favor of. Google plans to run http://search/ as a redirect service that “allows for registration by any search website providing a simple query interface.” “The mission of the proposed gTLD, .search, is to provide a domain name space that makes it easier for Internet users to locate and make use of the search functionality of their choice,” Google writes in its amended application. What exactly this will look like in practice remains to be seen, however. It’s definitely a novel use of the domain system, and judging from the amended application, Google will open this functionality up to third-party developers and its direct competitors. Of course, it remains to be seen who will actually get to manage .search. Besides Google, Amazon, dot Now Limited, and Donuts.co have also applied for this gTLD. .Blog, .App
TechCrunch
Former News Corp. president wants Hulu for $500 million, says report
Peter Chernin, who’s also a former Hulu board member, wants to buy the video-streaming service he helped launch, Reuters reports. [Read more]
CNET News
The ATF Wants To Know Who Your Friends Are
i_want_you_to_throw_ writes “You have a Friend Request from: Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms… ‘Confirm’? ‘Not Now’? Seriously, the ATF won’t try to friend you on Facebook. The ATF doesn’t just want a huge database to reveal everything about you with a few keywords. It wants one that can find out who you know. According to a recent solicitation from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the bureau is looking to buy a ‘massive online data repository system’ for its Office of Strategic Intelligence and Information (OSII).”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The Facebook Phone Is Finally Here, but Who Wants It?
The appeal of Facebook’s new phone software may limited to hardcore users.
On Thursday morning, Mark Zuckerberg stood smiling in front of a crowd of journalists and employees at Facebook’s headquarters and put months of rumors to an end. “Today we’re finally going to talk about that Facebook phone,” he said, referring to long-swirling speculation that the social network was secretly developing a device to rival the iPhone. He immediately clarified, adding, “More accurately, we’re going to talk about how you can turn your Android phone into a great, simple, social device.”
The Dash Car Dongle Wants To Make You A Better Driver By Syncing With Your iPhone
I love my tiny little Mazda, but I’ll be honest — I still don’t completely understand how it works. That’s never really bothered me before (I’d much rather geek out over a phone or something) but a Kickstarter project from a small team in Boston has me itching to pay more attention to what’s really going on under the hood. Long story short, Dash combines a Bluetooth 4.0-enabled dongle that plugs into your car’s on-board diagnostics port with a smartphone app that gives you up-to-date information how on your car is holding up.
Qualcomm Wants to Be Famous
Qualcomm is already worth more than Intel. Now the chip maker wants everyone to know it.
Qualcomm sells chips that go inside TVs, BMW dashboards, game consoles, and, most important, one-third of smartphones sold. It did $ 19 billion in business last year, and its stock market value has surpassed that of rival Intel.
PlayStation 4 lead looked at x86 chips in 2007, wants polished games on day one
Many game developers will tell you that the PlayStation 3′s Cell processor was a real bear to support. What they can’t tell you: the PlayStation 4′s lead architect, Mark Cerny, was already thinking of a solution as far back as 2007. He just revealed to Gamasutra that he’d been researching x86-based processors for the PS4 merely a year after the PS3 launch, knowing that there were “some issues” with realizing the Cell’s potential. The new console’s unified memory and eight-core CPU were the ultimate results of Cerny’s talks with game creators shortly after he took the reins in 2008. We’ve already seen the shift in attitudes through a very developer-centric PlayStation Meeting, but Cerny wants to underscore just how different the PS4′s holiday launch should be versus what we remember from 2006 — even the first wave of PS4 games should benefit from a healthy toolset, he says. We’ll know his long-term planning paid off if the initial PS4 library shows the level of refinement that took years to manifest on the PS3.
Via: Eurogamer
Source: Gamasutra
Qualcomm’s Got The Cash And The Market Share, But All It Really Wants Is To Be Noticed
Pool little Qualcomm: $ 100 billion in market cap but nobody knows your name. At least that’s the song the company is singing in a new MIT Technology Review article today, which features Qualcomm Chief Marketing Officer Anand Chandrasekher basically begging for attention. Qualcomm is the Intel of the mobile world, after all, but without garish stickers on every PC, a two-word catchy slogan and mascots in brightly colored cleanroom suits, it doesn’t enjoy the same level of public recognition.
TechCrunch
A Former Walmart Exec Wants to Help You Buy Less
An unlikely team comes together with a startup that aims to change retail by becoming the marketplace for the “sharing economy.”
A decade ago, Andy Ruben was in charge of global strategy at a company that environmentalists love to hate: Walmart. Adam Werbach was a firebrand activist who had served as the youngest-ever president of the venerable green group, the Sierra Club, at age 23. It’d be hard to imagine a more unlikely pair sitting together in a San Francisco office in 2013. But today Ruben and Werbach are founders of a six-person startup with a grand plan: to reduce waste and change the retail economy by getting people to stop buying $ 200 billion worth of stuff every year.
CrunchWeek: The Dongle Debacle, Game Of Thrones Comes To SF, And Who Wants A Smartwatch?
Happy Sunday! I hope you’ll agree with me when I say TGICW (Thank goodness it’s CrunchWeek) — that very special time each week when a few of us writers gather around the TechCrunch TV cameras to shoot the breeze about the biggest and most interesting stories from the past seven days.
TechCrunch
Samsung wants to get its hands on wristwatch market too
South Korean electronics giant’s next arm wrestling match with Apple may be over smart wristwatches that act as smartphones. [Read more]
CNET News
Obama Wants To Fund Clean Energy Research With Oil & Gas Funds
An anonymous reader writes “The Obama Administration has put forth a proposal to collect $ 2 billion over the next 10 years from revenues generated by oil and gas development to fund scientific research into clean energy technologies. The administration hopes the research would help ‘protect American families from spikes in gas prices and allow us to run our cars and trucks on electricity or homegrown fuels.’ In a speech at Argonne National Laboratory, Obama said the private sector couldn’t afford such research, which puts the onus on government to keep it going. Of course, it’ll still be difficult to get everyone on board: ‘The notion of funding alternative energy research with fossil fuel revenues has been endorsed in different forms by Republican politicians, including Alaskan senator Lisa Murkowsi. But the president still faces an uphill battle passing any major energy law, given how politicized programs to promote clean energy have become in the wake of high-profile failures of government-backed companies.’”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Google Wants to Replace All Your Passwords with a Ring
The world’s largest search engine is now experimenting with jewelry that would eliminate the need to remember dozens of passwords.
As part of research into doing away with typed passwords, Google has built rings that not only adorn a finger but also can be used to log in to a computer or online account.
NASA Wants New Space Net To Sustain Big Data Dumps; Moon and Mars Trips
coondoggie writes “What kind of network can support future commercial and government space trips around Earth and support bigger distances to the moon and Mars? NASA is in the process of exploring exactly what technology will be needed beyond 2022 in particular to support future space communication and navigation. The agency recently issued a Request for Information (RFI) to begin planning for such a new architecture.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Computer History Museum Wants to Preserve Minitel History
coondoggie writes “It’s been almost a year since France Telecom shut down its once widely popular Minitel online services and historians are worried that its legacy from a preservationist point of view is being lost forever. The Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA., naturally wants to collect and preserve all manner of industry historical artifacts, and Minitel is one of the central components of its ‘Revolution: The First 2000 Years of Computing’ exhibit.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
With Users In Over 83 Countries, Social Discovery Platform At The Pool Wants To Be The Anti-Facebook
At The Pool, the Los Angeles-based social discovery platform, is today rolling out a big re-design that sees the startup becoming laser-focused on creating the “anti-Facebook” social network for young people. In its February 10-K report, Facebook said that it is at risk of losing young users to other services that are similar to or act “as a substitute for Facebook.”
TechCrunch
Kickstarter project wants to help men (and their sperm) chill out
The most important story you’ll read about scrotal cooling today. [Read more]
CNET News
Google Wants to Install a Computer on Your Face
Capcom wants Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate sales to take off in the U.S.
Capcom hopes to increase the popularity of its Monster Hunter game series in the U.S. The franchise has been and still is one of the most popular in Japan. Throughout the world, the Monster Hunter game series has sold over 22 million copies, but the majority of the sales occurred in Japan. There have been
This iPhone Breathalyzer Wants To Call You A Cab
Last Saturday, I got sauced for purely journalistic purposes: I had to test out what could be the first law enforcement-grade iPhone breathalyzer accessory. It was also Purim, the delightful Jewish holiday that celebrates my people’s liberation from yet another anti-semitic tyrant with dancing and a lot of alcohol. Alcohoot, an iPhone accessory that plugs into the phone’s audio port, wants to make accurate breathalyzers more affordable (at only $ 95) and seamlessly integrates with other notable smartphone apps, like on demand car service Uber. If a user on the verge of drunk texting their ex-girlfriend while driving home blows over the legal limit, Alcohoot wants the software to seamlessly call the sad sack a discounted cab. With over 10,000 impaired driving deaths in 2010 alone, any technology that attaches responsible drinking to the viral nature of iPhone software is a welcome addition to society. Even without the potential software integration, the Israeli-based startup’s breathalyzer has an attractive price-point. While keychain breathalyzers go for the low-low price of $ 70, a Wired review found that they were extraordinarily inaccurate. Fuel-cell based measures–the same used by police–will set responsible citizens back over $ 250. Alcohoot expects to hit the retail market for only $ 99. Yet, what’s really attractive about the concept of an iPhone-based breathalyzer is the social integration. For starters, the slick interface is fun to pass around. I and my other ancient Hebrew descendants were eager to pass around Alcohoot and see how drunk we were. The device promotes sobriety awareness without the buzzkill of sending a grown-up hall-monitor to dish out guilt. Second, the founders hope to partner with car services, such as Uber, Lyft, or Sidecar to offer blitzed users a discounted, convenient ride home. Imagine blowing into and Alcohoot, unexpectedly realizing realizing you’re much drunker than you thought, and then being asked if you’d like to accept a discounted Uber? Psychologically, it’d be much harder to pass up the responsible decision, especially if you could automatically brag on facebook for making the ethical choice. The breathalyzer prototype debuted at a meeting of the Kairos Society in New York, an annual gathering of socially-oriented young entrepreneurs. I go to a lot of startup pitch conferences, and Kairos had impressive array of members. In addition to Alcohoot, the conference included a Dreambox, a 3D printing vending machine, Virtual U, a retail-based full-body scanner that sizes up consumer body measurements for online
TechCrunch
Jolla Wants To Build A Foursquare Phone, A Facebook Phone — Whatever It Takes To Wake Smartphones From Their Android Slumber
Finnish startup Jolla is open for business. That’s the message CEO Marc Dillon was putting out, loud and clear, during two on stage appearances at the Mobile World Congress tradeshow in Barcelona last week. Not a bad amount of stage time for a first time MWC attendee and a mobile upstart that hasn’t sold a single handset yet because it’s still busy making its first phone.
TechCrunch
Why Qualcomm Wants To Bring Ultrasound Transmitters To Smartphones And Tablets
Mobile chipmaker Qualcomm has a track record of pushing new capabilities into its chips faster than its competitors in a bid to carve out a bigger chunk of the market — and one of its latest acquisitions is in the field of digital ultrasound. So what capabilities could this technology bring to phones and tablets?
TechCrunch
The Weekly Good: Embrace Wants To Give All Infants An Equal Chance For A Healthy Life
Disruption comes in all shapes and sizes, and benefits people of all shapes and sizes. When you think about global entrepreneurs solving hard problems, you might not think about creating hardware products that aim to save the lives of premature babies.Ubisoft wants to improve its relationship with PC gamers
Stephanie Perotti, director of Uplay, has stated that Ubisoft wants to improve its relationship with PC gamers. The company has had immense popularity with console gamers and has shown favoritism to consoles in the past. One example would be the company releasing games, like Assassin’s Creed 3, to the consoles one month before they become
Open Source Emoji Project Wants Money For Icons
Kagetsuki writes “There’s a project on KickStarter for a Free and Open set of emoji [the graphical emoticon glyph set which has a block reserved in Unicode]. Currently there are no full sets of Emoji that are completely free (as in beer and and freedom), so if this project gets funded it will be the first and only set of emoji that can, say, be distributed with FLOSS Linux/BSD/GNU systems. Not to mention anyone will be able to incorporate them into any project without any restrictive conditions.” And lest you think emoji devoid of literary value, reader coondoggie points out that the Library of Congress has just welcomed (or at least allowed) onto its vaunted shelves an all-emoji version of Melville’s Moby Dick, created with the help of translators working through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Insert Coin semifinalist: Radiator Labs wants to help you control your heat
Just about any apartment-dwelling urbanite can tell you that radiators are a bit of a necessary evil in the world of city living. What if there was a way to control the heat to individual rental units, without relying entirely on a landlord’s temperature-controlling omnipotence? The Radiator Labs team has developed a device to help realize this dream. It’s essentially housing that sits on-top of an individual radiator unit, controlling heat transfer to a room. Turn it off, and the insulation hampers the heat from making a room too hot. Turn it on, and the ducted fan spreads the heat out to the room.
Radiator Labs has a bit more info on its page, which you can check out in the source link below. You can also view graphical breakdown of the technology after the break.
Check out the full list of Insert Coin: New Challengers semifinalists here — and don’t forget to pick a winner!
Source: Radiator Labs
Xerox’s CEO Wants to Shake Up the Services Market
Ursula Burns says Xerox can outfox low-cost outsourcing companies with better technology.
Xerox dominated the office of yesterday with its copiers, laser printers, and fax machines. Now Ursula Burns is trying to strengthen its role in the offices of tomorrow. Since becoming CEO in 2009, she has increased Xerox’s sales of IT-related services, like processing health insurance claims and managing customer-service call centers. Nevertheless, Burns—a mechanical engineer who has worked at Xerox since an internship in 1980—told MIT Technology Review’s deputy editor, Brian Bergstein, that the company isn’t straying from its technological roots.
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