Archive for: July 5, 2009
July 5, 2009
6,000 or so people have congregated at the Rio hotel in Las Vegas for this year’s World Series of Poker to fight for $50 million or so that will be split among the last 10% of players left standing. Among them are a number of tech startup entrepreneurs. We’re tracking four of them, plus any others that pop up. This is David Sacks’ third WSOP. Sacks, a former PayPal exec and the CEO of Geni / Yammer , walked away with nothing two years ago. Last year he took home $25k in prize money, and twittered every hand. This year he’s way up after the first day, with $91k in chips. That likely puts him in the top 10% of players. He is twittering summaries of his play at @davidsacks . You can see his player card here with last year’s results. Jason Calacanis ( Mahalo founder) is playing today for the first time. He’s been sponsored by FullTiltPoker (they paid his $10k buy in) and looks absolutely ridiculous (he’s pictured above). Look for his twitters later this afternoon. Facebook exec Chamath Palihapitiya is playing beginning today as well. And we’ve heard but haven’t verified that former Yahoo exec David Goldberg (currently CEO of SurveyMonkey) is at the WSOP too. The tournament has just started so there isn’t much to report yet. One concern we have - Sacks is set to speak at our real time event this Friday , which is day three of the tournament. He told me today that if he makes it to day three he “has to play,” and won’t make the event. My response? It was NSFW. Good luck to everyone. Except Sacks. I hope he loses it all on day 2. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
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6,000 or so people have congregated at the Rio hotel in Las Vegas for this year’s World Series of Poker to fight for $50 million or so that will be split among the last 10% of players left standing. Among them are a number of tech startup entrepreneurs. We’re tracking four of them, plus any others that pop up. This is David Sacks’ third WSOP. Sacks, a former PayPal exec and the CEO of Geni / Yammer , walked away with nothing two years ago. Last year he took home $25k in prize money, and twittered every hand. This year he’s way up after the first day, with $91k in chips. That likely puts him in the top 10% of players. He is twittering summaries of his play at @davidsacks . You can see his player card here with last year’s results. Jason Calacanis ( Mahalo founder) is playing today for the first time. He’s been sponsored by FullTiltPoker (they paid his $10k buy in) and looks absolutely ridiculous (he’s pictured above). Look for his twitters later this afternoon. Facebook exec Chamath Palihapitiya is playing beginning today as well. And we’ve heard but haven’t verified that former Yahoo exec David Goldberg (currently CEO of SurveyMonkey) is at the WSOP too. The tournament has just started so there isn’t much to report yet. One concern we have - Sacks is set to speak at our real time event this Friday , which is day three of the tournament. He told me today that if he makes it to day three he “has to play,” and won’t make the event. My response? It was NSFW. Good luck to everyone. Except Sacks. I hope he loses it all on day 2. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
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The new browser wars on on. More than a decade after Microsoft killed off Netscape with Internet Explorer, competition in the browser market has never been stronger. Just last week , Mozilla released Firefox 3.5 , which has now been downloaded nearly 14 million times. Earlier in June , Apple released Safari 4 . In March, Microsoft introduced Internet Explorer 8 , and Google came out with a speedier beta of its Chrome browser. Some early data is coming in showing relative market share and how fast people are upgrading. If you look at the chart above from Statcounter , it indicates that since March Internet Explorer has lost 11.4 percent market share to other browsers. That is the combined market share of IE8, IE7, and IE6. Certainly IE8 (the light blue line) has been growing strong since its release last March, capturing 16.7 percent of the market as of July 4. Those strong gains make up for most of the drop in IE7’s market share from 49.1 percent in March to 30.1 percent yesterday, indicating that Microsoft is doing a good job of getting existing IE7 users to upgrade at a steady pace. And in mid-June, IE8 finally surpassed IE6, which still stubbornly holds a 7.6 percent share. Add those three up, (IE6+IE7+IE8), however, and IE all together holds only a 54.4 percent market share versus the 65.8 percent combined share in March, 2009. In just over three months, Internet Explorer has seen its overall market share erode by 11.4 percent. Where did that go? It went to Firefox, Safari, and Chrome. Nearly 5 percent of that, or about half, went to Firefox 3.0, which currently has 27.6 percent market share. That doesn’t count last week’s upgrade. See the dotted line just below the light blue IE8 line? ...
Danish website Mobil got their hands on some documents about Sony Ericsson’s first Android phone. Codenamed Rachael it is expected to be released later this year as part of their XPERIA range. The phone will contain the Qualcomm QSD8250 Snapdragon platform, which should give the phone a speed of 1GHz and faster HSPA speed of up to 7.2Mbps. The Snapdragon platform also has great 3D graphics capabilities which obviously opens many doors for games capabilities etc. Although all the specs haven’t been released the phone will have an 8MP camera with auto-focus a 3.5mm jack and a mini-USB connector. Source : Mobil via Engadget Post from: Mighty Gadget - Gadget and Technology Blog Sony Ericsson’s upcoming Android-based handset Tags: Android , snapdragon , Sony Ericsson Related posts Toshiba TG01 with 1GHz Snapdragon Qualcomm CPU! (0) The Eco-Friendly Sony Ericsson C901 GreenHeart and Naite (0) T-Mobile G1 Vs iPhone 3G Video Reviews (0) T-Mobile G1 Android handset jailbroken (0) Spotify for Android (0)
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Sony Ericsson’s upcoming Android-based handset
Danish website Mobil got their hands on some documents about Sony Ericsson’s first Android phone. Codenamed Rachael it is expected to be released later this year as part of their XPERIA range. The phone will contain the Qualcomm QSD8250 Snapdragon platform, which should give the phone a speed of 1GHz and faster HSPA speed of up to 7.2Mbps. The Snapdragon platform also has great 3D graphics capabilities which obviously opens many doors for games capabilities etc. Although all the specs haven’t been released the phone will have an 8MP camera with auto-focus a 3.5mm jack and a mini-USB connector. Source : Mobil via Engadget Post from: Mighty Gadget - Gadget and Technology Blog Sony Ericsson’s upcoming Android-based handset Tags: Android , snapdragon , Sony Ericsson Related posts Toshiba TG01 with 1GHz Snapdragon Qualcomm CPU! (0) The Eco-Friendly Sony Ericsson C901 GreenHeart and Naite (0) T-Mobile G1 Vs iPhone 3G Video Reviews (0) T-Mobile G1 Android handset jailbroken (0) Spotify for Android (0)
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Sony Ericsson’s upcoming Android-based handset
A survey of 2300 retail stores reveals that Apple has cleaned up in the smartphone market in Japan, TG Daily reports. Market research company BCN revealed that the iPhone 3G 8GB is easily heading the list, followed by the 16GB iPhone and the NTT CoCoMo Aquos SH-04A. Is the ranking reliable? “Yes,” Akky Akimoto of Asiajin from Japan answered. “The shops which give their POS (point of sale) data to BCN include some nationwide chain stores, such like Eiden, K’s Denki, Bic Camera, Best Denki and, you may know this company name, Amazon Japan.” The writer also points us with the ranking’s Japanese page . Released in July last year, Apple’s iPhone 3G has been sold over a million in Japan since then. The survey was conducted before the launch of the iPhone 3GS by Softbank , the country’s third largest wireless carrier, on June 26. Akimoto also wrote : The new iPhone 3GS started to be sold in Japan on June 26th. For your information, interestingly, the iPhone 3GS (32GB) and (16GB) seemed to be ranked at No. 174 and No. 189 on last week’s ranking, even before its release date. The old version iPhone 3G 16GB is ranked at No. 27 down a bit from No. 23 last week, which is also interesting. Who buys the old one when the new one is coming and your payment will not differ? [ TG Daily via Fortune | image credit ]
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iPhone is no. 1 now in Japan. Finally…
Some iPhone 3GS buyers were experiencing that their new Apple device has lower battery life, the Los Angeles Times reports, saying it “has trouble making it through a workday without a rest stop at the electrical outlet.” Take Gary Ng, 27, one of them. “If people are committing $1,000 a year for two years to use a 3GS, I would definitely expect my battery to last a lot longer,” said Ng, a loyal Apple fan who runs an iPhone blog from his home in Vancouver, Canada. According to IFixit.com, repairing company which specializes in Apple products, the 3GS’s battery life was about 15% smaller than the original iPhone. But Apple spokeswoman Natalie Harrison emphasized, battery consumption is highly dependent on what applications and features are used. Are you also having battery issues with the 3GS? Share your experience (or even solution) here. [via Los Angeles Times ]
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iPhone 3GS owners complain about the battery life
The chances of me being genuinely amazed at something I see a Belgian tech company achieve are rather slim. But occasionally, it happens. Last week I went to local entrepreneur meetup BetaGroup and saw five startups pitch their stuff to the 200-headed audience. The last one to get its five minutes of fame was Cherry , a new mobile operator that promised to “revolutionize the telecom world”. Needless to say, I was as curious as I was skeptical. Then the company’s CEO got up on stage, introduced himself, took out his Nokia smartphone, called some random guy in the audience and had him call him back on his phone afterwards. Projecting his mobile phone screen on a bigger screen for everyone to see, he demonstrated how he didn’t need to launch an application and just browsed his contact list to call the other person. Standard functionality, sure, but the cool part of it was the fact that the phone was lacking the presence of a SIM card, which is supposed to identify you as a subscriber of a telephony service. I was intrigued. By now you’ll have guessed that the calling was done over Wi-Fi, which I suppose isn’t really unique even if it made me wonder how they did it without launching a third-party app like Skype. Looking to learn more, I went to their official coming-out event the evening after, when they presented the newly founded company to a host of local geeks in more detail, giving them the chance to beta-test the service for a couple of weeks to iron out bugs before launching publicly. Here’s how it works: Cherry - which is essentially an MVNO - pre-installs software (so yes, in the demo there was actually an application running in the background) on smartphones which ...
One thing I hated about being a corporate lawyer at Wilson Sonsini back in the day - we got to work on really cool deals (the last deal I worked on before leaving for a startup was the AOL/Netscape merger), but we were only brought in at the very end to paper everything. We fought over the fine print in the contracts after the meat of the deal was ironed out by CEOs. Skinning and dressing whatever the hunters bring back to the cave is fine for some people. But it’s not exactly being in the middle of the action. PR firms today aren’t much different than corporate lawyers. They are paid to perform a service. They like to think of themselves as core to the strategic action of their clients. But more often, they’re just there to spin whatever happened in the most favorable light possible. Then they smile and dial and pray for coverage. Occasionally they are called in to smother a story, which is mildly more exciting, I imagine. But when a CEO is wondering what she should do next to drive her business forward, she generally doesn’t call her PR firm for advice. Or at least I hope she doesn’t. PR firms are apparently just as frustrated by always being in the back seat as the law firms are. I’m fascinated by Clair Cain Miller’s article in the New York Times today about PR in general and the birth of a startup, Wordnik , specifically. Forget the tech blogs, said investor Roger McNamee . Brew PR head Brooke Hammerling instantly acquiesced, and decided to go with a sort of guerrilla approach instead by “whispering” into the ears of prominent Twitter users like Kevin Rose, Jay Adelson and Jason Calacanis. CNET was also given the story ...
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