The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- Peter Thiel To The New Yorker: “I Don’t Consider [The iPhone] To Be A Technological Breakthrough
- Gillmor Gang Live (TCTV)
- HouseTrip Gets $17m Series B Led By Balderton Capital – Look Out AirBnB
- Questli Launches iOS App To Allow Users To Take On Virtual And Real World Quests
- Google Drops The Price Of Chromebooks to $299 And Polishes The Interface
- Despite Poor Reviews, Kindle Fire On Track To Be #2 Tablet
- BlackBerry Sales Slow Down As The Holiday Season Approaches
- Stamped Is Now Ready For Your Approval
- Video Platform Startup Veenome Raises $500K From Ecosystem VC & Angels
- Diagnosia Secures Seed Round To Create Global Drugs Info Search Engine
- The Nook Tablet Gets Torn Apart For Fun And Profit
- eBay Buys Recommendation Service Hunch To Improve Buying, Selling [Updated]
- Ice Cream Sandwich Will Get Flash Support By The End Of The Year
- RunKeeper Raises $10 Million From Spark Capital, Steve Case, And OATV
- Tablets.com Goes Up For Sale
- The EXOdesk Is A Poor Man’s Microsoft Surface, But It’s Still Dripping With Multitouch Awesomeness (Video)
- Visa Teams Up With Shopkick To Dole Out Retailer Reward Points At The Point Of Sale
- Turn Pizza Boxes Into Computer Interfaces With “Invoked Computing” (Video)
- Sumitomo Chemical Reports Breakthrough In Large-Sized OLED TV Mass-Production
- Gadgets Week in Review: Surface Time
| Peter Thiel To The New Yorker: “I Don’t Consider [The iPhone] To Be A Technological Breakthrough Posted: 21 Nov 2011 09:22 AM PST  Peter Thiel is a grump, but a special kind of grump. He is a dystopian utopian (if such a person can exist). The investor who wrote the first check for Facebook both believes in the power of technology to transform our lives, and is perennially disappointed by it. A lengthy profile in the November 28, 2011 edition of the New Yorker (summary here) states: “his main lament is that America—the country that invented the modern assembly line, the skyscraper, the airplane, and the personal computer—has lost its belief in the future.” It is an argument he’s made before. Last September, at Disrupt SF he made the case that innovation is dead across most of the economy (you can watch the video of the session below). He is co-authoring a book on the subject with Max Levchin and Gary Kasparov, called The Blueprint. But what about something like the iPhone? ”I don’t consider this to be a technological breakthrough,” he tells the New Yorker. Technology simply isn’t creating enough jobs or moving the needle in areas like transportation, health, or energy. From the article, here is his assessment on the impact of the Internet, Apple, and Twitter:
Thiel is a natural contrarian who is never satisfied with the status quo, which is a good thing in a venture capitalist and startup mentor. But I think he dismisses the global impact of technologies like the iPhone and social networks a bit too easily. Having a fully functioning computer in your pocket opens up entirely new experiences—and markets. Was it predictable? Yes. But that doesn’t make it any less transformative. Social media, combined with mobile technologies, are powering protests and revolutions around the world and changing the way people consume information. But will these technologies improve living standards? The fact that the companies creating the technologies are capital efficient shouldn’t be a mark against them. What about the economic value created by the people who use the technologies. Putting a computer in the hands of business people away from the office, or a farmer in the field could yield significant improvements in productivity. It all depends on what kind of value you place on staying connected.
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| Posted: 21 Nov 2011 09:06 AM PST |
| HouseTrip Gets $17m Series B Led By Balderton Capital – Look Out AirBnB Posted: 21 Nov 2011 09:04 AM PST  HouseTrip, the holiday lettings marketplace raised $2.7m from Index Ventures back in April and relaunched to appeal to a wider market than its holiday apartments rental space. HouseTrip built a reputation by removing the need for guests to negotiate with homeowners directly, thus building in a degree of security. Today it’s completed a $17 million Series B funding round led by Balderton Capital. Index Ventures reinvested pro-rata. The funding will be used to develop the product, generate more inventory (through additional outreach to holiday apartment hosts) and reach (through marketing and localisation).
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| Questli Launches iOS App To Allow Users To Take On Virtual And Real World Quests Posted: 21 Nov 2011 09:00 AM PST  Questli, one of the Audience Choice winners at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco this year, is debuting its IOS app today. You can download the app here. As we wrote in our initial review, Questli is all about playing someone else’s Quests. Users can create both web and virtual Quests for others to participate in. So you could hide a $5 bill in JFK and create a series of complicated tasks that a player has to complete in order to find the money. A sample web-based Quest could involve connecting with a person online, and asking for an answer key. Questli has also implemented password protected Quests, so people can play what the startup calls, “private treasure hunts” during events. Founder Danil Kozyatnikov, who hails from Siberia, says that the app is getting a lot of attention from businesses for sponsored quests.
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| Google Drops The Price Of Chromebooks to $299 And Polishes The Interface Posted: 21 Nov 2011 08:58 AM PST  Happy holidays, everyone! Yours Truly, the Google Chromebook team! Google just announced several Chromebook updates that should wash away the holiday blues. First off, prices are dropping. Per a post at Google’s official blog, Chromebooks from both Acer and Samsung will be available starting at $299 “beginning this week.” That’s a $50 price drop on both the Acer AC700 and Samsung Series 5 models although some retailers are currently selling the Acer model at $299 already. No word on if the higher-priced, 3G models are getting a lower price, though.
Chromebook retailers such as Amazon and Best Buy have yet to update their pricing — maybe they didn’t get the memo yet. If you have a little extra room in your holiday budget, the WiFi-only Samsung Series 5 now comes in black and retails for $349.
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| Despite Poor Reviews, Kindle Fire On Track To Be #2 Tablet Posted: 21 Nov 2011 08:51 AM PST  According to new consumer survey data from ChangeWave Research, Amazon’s Kindle Fire is poised to become the first real competitor to the Apple iPad, with one in five planned tablet buyers (22%) indicating they will purchase the Kindle Fire. This is the first time since the original iPad’s launch that the number two device ever achieved a double-digit percentage in terms of consumer interest. The data comes from a November 2011 survey of 3,043 North American consumers, who were polled on their past, current and future tablet-buying plans. According to the results, 2% of respondents had already pre-ordered the device, 5% said they were “very likely” to buy and 12% said they’re “somewhat likely” to buy. Of course, the problem with surveys like this is that consumer interest doesn’t always mirror real-world buying trends. It’s easy to indicate you like a product, but it’s much harder to actually open your wallet and pay for it. That said, what this survey does show is the power of the Amazon and Kindle brands in the minds’ of consumers. Unfortunately, Amazon may have to trade on its brand awareness and affinity to make the Kindle Fire a hit. The tablet has received mixed to downright negative reviews from a variety of sources including The NYT’s David Pogue, The WSJ’s Walt Mossberg, The Economist, Wired, Engadget, The Verge and others. Reviewers claim the software lacks polish and feels sluggish. “ “You feel that $200 price tag with every swipe of your finger,” was one of the more memorable Kindle Fire slams from Pogue. Meanwhile, Mossberg summarily dismissed it with just a few sentences:
Yikes. And yet, Dave Limp, Vice President, Amazon Kindle, announced last week that the Fire had become the best-selling product across all of Amazon.com. Still, we wonder how many unsatisfied customers will return their Kindle Fires later on? Or will the tablet be “good enough,” given its low price point? If consumers buy, then regret, their Kindle Fire purchase, that could be a problem for the brand further down the road. As ChangeWave also notes, customer satisfaction is one of the key reason’s for Apple’s iPad dominance, with 74% of owners saying they’re “very satisfied” with their device. Only 49% say the same for all other tablet manufacturers combined. November’s research also showed increasing tablet demand, including an uptick due to the holidays. 14% of respondents claimed they would buy a tablet in the next 90 days, a number that’s up 8 points since August. Despite the expected Kindle Fire gains, Apple still leads by a wide margin, with 65% indicating they will buy the iPad compared with the 22% demonstrating interest in the Kindle Fire.
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| BlackBerry Sales Slow Down As The Holiday Season Approaches Posted: 21 Nov 2011 08:39 AM PST  It’s a fact of life for many a new smartphone on the market: the impressive sales seen at launch and during the first few weeks will inevitably taper off. RIM’s new line of BlackBerrys may have already blown through that initial grace period, if RBC Capital Market’s Mike Abramsky is to be believed. Abramsky noted to investors this morning that BlackBerry sales have begun to slow down as RIM heads into the holiday season. "Despite on-time BlackBerry 7 launches, checks are showing slowing domestic sell-through, plus impacts from recent service outages and PlayBook challenges (delayed software, sluggish sell-through)," Abramsky said. The news can’t be too welcome to the folks at Waterloo, seeing as RBC Capital Markets had previously maintained a bullish stance on the company’s future. For what it’s worth, RIM can take solace in the fact that they enjoy a strong position in international markets — Abramsky refers to them as the top vendor in Great Britain and Indonesia. Still, at home and in the U.S., RIM is looking at a dire set of circumstances. Their new BlackBerry 7-powered devices must compete with top-tier smartphones from Apple, Samsung, Motorola, and HTC (among others) this holiday season, and they’re already feeling the squeeze. Abramsky isn’t the first to notice the dip in BlackBerry sales — Canaccord Genuity’s T. Michael Walkley reported on a similar situation last week in a note to investors, and notes that the new iPhone has helped in removing the wind from RIM’s sails. “While our September/October checks indicated solid sales of new BlackBerry operating system 7 models, especially the Bold 9000 series as an upgrade enterprise sale, our recent checks indicate slowing sales trends post the launch of the iPhone 4S and price reductions of the iPhone 4 and 3GS,” said Walkley. Meanwhile, RIM’s BBX-powered lifeboat isn’t expected to see the light of day until the middle of next year, which amounts to ages in the mobile space. A brief look at what could be the company’s first BBX BlackBerry revealed a list of specs that would have trouble wowing customers even now, let alone next year. In spite of everything though, RIM’s upper brass continues to put on a brave face. While on a conference call in September, RIM co-CEO Jim Balsillie said that he felt the company was well-positioned going into the holidays, but we’ll soon see if his confidence was warranted.
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| Stamped Is Now Ready For Your Approval Posted: 21 Nov 2011 08:00 AM PST  One of the great pastimes of the Web is rating places and things, but now with mobile phones you can rate them anywhere, and not just things but experiences. Enter Stamped, a New York City startup founded by ex-Googlers that wants to be your go-to app for rating restaurants, books, movies, and music. The iPhone app just launched on iTunes. Stamped simplifies ratings. Gone are the five stars. You either stamp something with your approval or you don’t. But don’t stamp too liberally because you only get 100 stamps to start out with (you can earn more by being active on the service). You can follow what your friends are stamping to get a steady stream of recommendations. The app will also feature suggested users like chef Mario Batali (an adviser to the company) and Rolling Stone movie critic Peter Travers. Share your stamps more broadly on Twitter.Open up the map view to see stamps near you. Put some to your to-do list, add your own stamp. If you don’t want to waste a stamp, you can show your approval with a weaker “like.” The app is comparable to Kevin Rose’s Oink in that it lets you rate things at a very granular level, but it is much more structured than Oink, which is organized around free-form hashtags. Stamped steers users towards rating restaurants (pulled from Google Places and OpenTable),books (pulled from Amazon), movies (pulled from Fandango), and music (pulled from iTunes). If something is not in the Stamped database, you can add it. But for those categories, the app does a great job. You can filter the stream of your friends’ Stamps by category, and often there is the option to book a table at a restaurant through OpenTable or download a song through iTunes. The more you stamp, the more the app knows your interests. Down the line, the company could possibly target offers or ads based on your interest profile for places, books, music, and movies you’ve explicitly said that you like. Co-founder Robby Stein worked as a product manager on Google’s Ad Exchange and co-founder Bart Stein (not related) worked in marketing. The third co-sounder, Kevin Palms, was rescued from a hedge fund. The company is backed by Bain Capital and Google Ventures, and Instagram founder Kevin Systrom (also an ex-Googler) is another adviser.
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| Video Platform Startup Veenome Raises $500K From Ecosystem VC & Angels Posted: 21 Nov 2011 07:50 AM PST  Washington, D.C.-based video indexing and discovery startup Veenome has raised $500, 000 in seed funding from Ecosystem Ventures (investors in Tube Mogul and Facebook), plus private angel investors from Google, Dingman Center Angels, as well as Chegg founder Aayush Phumhra and the founder of WebMetrics Tim Drees. The company uses proprietary automated video recognition technology to scan video clips for products, brands and objects which can be tagged and indexed. Once identified and tagged, these items can then be linked to associated content elsewhere, like an e-commerce storefront or a social media site. That means, for example, if you liked the sunglasses Lady Gaga was wearing in her latest video, you could just click on them within the video to purchase. Veenome says the additional funding will be used to enhance its recognition algorithms and APIs for its early customers. The company is currently running a beta test with participants who include major global publishers and video providers. At first blush, the new service sounds an awful lot like a video version of ThingLink, the other media-tagging startup that lets you tag photos and images hosted online. However, unlike ThingLink, which requires you tag each item explicitly, the content providers and producers who use Veenome just have to install a plugin on their website to get started. Veenome then crawls their site and overlays the advertising on the videos it finds there. Plugins will be available for the major blog platforms and some custom channels, the company says. This automatic image scanning and tagging functionality is also how Veenom differentiates itself from other video startups that offer tagging, like Viddler, BlipSnips, Vidtaggr, and others. Veenome’s business model resembles AdWords, where interested advertisers and marketers will bid on the tags in videos. Content producers will share the ad revenue with Veenome. Veenome was founded by CEO Kevin Lenane and CTO David Geller. Lenane was most recently the Director of Mobile Strategy at PointAbout and has product management experience in Web, mobile and location-based services. Geller is the former CEO of Plexstar and of Amazing Media.
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| Diagnosia Secures Seed Round To Create Global Drugs Info Search Engine Posted: 21 Nov 2011 07:49 AM PST  Back in March we reported on Diagnosia, a startup that is aiming to become “a search engine for drugs” by providing a safe place for people looking up medicine information. Today it’s a secured an undisclosed “6-figure” seed round (though we know they were looking for €200,000) into the Vienna-based startup. The round was led by Johann Hansmann, a former pharma entrepreneur and now active angel investor whose recent investments include the leading language learning tool busuu and weight-loss startup iJoule. He was joined by Christoph Sauermann, a former pharma executive and tech entrepreneur.
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| The Nook Tablet Gets Torn Apart For Fun And Profit Posted: 21 Nov 2011 07:43 AM PST  The fine folks over at iFixit just posted their latest trademark teardown guide. This time around the victim is the brand new Nook Tablet. Much like its Kindle counterpart, the low-cost B&N tablet doesn’t hide anything all that surprising. It is, after all, just an upgraded Nook Color. We won’t spoil all of iFixit’s findings but they found SanDisk memory, Hynix memory and that the pretty 7-inch IPS screen is manufactured by LG. However, the best part of the Nook Tablet’s innards is that the battery is labeled NOOKCOLOR even though the Nook Tablet’s battery life is rated 3.5 hours longer than its predecessor’s. All the glory deets are posted at iFixit.
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| eBay Buys Recommendation Service Hunch To Improve Buying, Selling [Updated] Posted: 21 Nov 2011 06:52 AM PST  Hunch, a service that provides a “taste graph” of personalized recommendations based on users’ interests, has just been bought by auction site eBay, the companies have confirmed. The amount hasn’t officially been disclosed, but Michael Arrington (who had the scoop this morning) hears that it’s around $80 million. [Update: We caught up with Dixon and eBay chief technology officer Mark Carges by phone just now, and got some more details on the deal and what it means for both companies. Our notes below.] Founded in late 2007 and launched in 2009, the New York company will be used by eBay to help improve buying and selling recommendations for its users. From the release:
Cofounder Chris Dixon (a regular contributor here at TechCrunch) says on his company blog that the relationship with eBay started after Hunch began allowing other companies to use its Taste Graph. As part of eBay, Hunch will continue to operate somewhat independently — all of its employees are staying on at its New York headquarters, and the Hunch.com site will stay live. Hunch had raised around $20 million from investors including Bessemer Venture Partners, General Catalyst and Khosla Ventures and Ron Conway. Interview notes: Dixon and Carges say that the deal will help surface more quality recommendations from eBay’s “long tail” of unstructured listings. Let’s say a coin collector is on eBay looking to add to their collection. As Dixon explains, Hunch might be able to surface relevant items that aren’t obvious, like microscopes that are especially good for coin analysis. Traditional machine learning won’t necessarily be able to identify the same sorts of connections. Of course, other retail sites, like Amazon, provide recommendations as well — “users who also bought X bought Y” — but those methods rely on existing catalogs, Carges says. The 20-person Hunch team will begin working with eBay’s data science team “ASAP,” and will anchor the auction company’s physical expansion into New York. Carges is planning to hire more data and engineering employees for that office, along with product-oriented staffers, like designers. In terms of results for eBay users, there won’t be any drastic changes. Hunch will rather be providing more nuanced recommendations on the back-end, resulting (they hope) in more meaningful discoveries, more stickiness on the site, and ultimately more buying and selling. The two aren’t commenting on the deal price, or on Hunch’s current revenues. The Hunch.com site will stay live, and will continue to experiment, similar to what eBay has done with local search acquisition Milo last year, according to Carges. There a no changes planned for Hunch’s open API or its other partnerships. We’re also talking to Dixon, a serial entrepreneur and investor, about having him do one of his TechCrunch Founder Stories interviews with, er, himself… we’ll figure out how to set that up.
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| Ice Cream Sandwich Will Get Flash Support By The End Of The Year Posted: 21 Nov 2011 06:48 AM PST  It seemed, for a time, that the book on mobile Flash as we knew it was closed. Adobe announced just a few weeks ago that development for mobile Flash would cease, and their efforts and resources would soon be focused elsewhere. As it turns out, Adobe has one last project up their sleeves before they bid mobile Flash adieu: an update that includes support for Ice Cream Sandwich. Earlier reports mentioned that Google believed Flash support for Android 4.0 was forthcoming, but an Adobe representative has confirmed to Pocket-lint that Ice Cream Sandwich will indeed get Flash support by the end of 2011. Now, don’t expect to fire up your Galaxy Nexus (whenever you should happen to get it) and find the ICS-tailored version of Flash waiting for you. Nor will you be able to find and install an older version of Flash from the Android market for the time being. Galaxy Nexus users will join the iOS crowd in being locked out of the web’s Flash content until Adobe pushes out their last major release. After that update goes out though, mobile Flash will ride off into the sunset. Adobe made it clear in their announcement that the app would only see security updates and critical bugfixes going forward. With all that manpower freed up, Adobe plans to refocus their mobile efforts on AIR and HTML5, the latter of which they have called “the best solution for creating and deploying content in the browser across mobile platforms.” As Adobe’s Mike Chambers mentioned in his explanation of mobile Flash’s demise, the future of rich mobile content has very little to do with Flash, and nearly everything to applications and HTML5. That doesn’t mean that the platform is dying off completely though — Adobe licensee RIM has pledged to continue supporting Flash on their PlayBook platform, and all of mobile Flash’s current users can continue to use it if they’ve got it.
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| RunKeeper Raises $10 Million From Spark Capital, Steve Case, And OATV Posted: 21 Nov 2011 06:45 AM PST  The race is on to create a new class of consumer-driven health companies. One of the most popular health and fitness apps on the iPhone, RunKeeper, is started tackling by making it easy for people to measure their exercise, but now it is busy building out an entire “Health Graph” so that all sorts of health data can plug into its service. The Boston-based company raised $10 million in a Series B financing, led by Spark Capital. Steve Case’s Revolution Ventures also participated, along with existing investor OATV. The company has 14 employees and is looking to hire more. RunKeeper is gunning to become the Facebook of Fitness by tying together data from all sorts of fitness apps and services. Since it opened up its Health Graph API in June, 40 services are no integrated. Third party data sharing is still relatively small, but it is doubling every month. As Rip wrote in June:
If it can assemble all your fitness and health data and deliver it to you in its dashboard, RunKeeper has a shot at spreading well beyond fitness buffs to anyone who wants to take control of their health.
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| Posted: 21 Nov 2011 06:42 AM PST  Domain name investment company XF.com Investments is putting one of the most valuable single-word domains up for sale today: tablets.com. The company says it feels like now is the perfect time to release the domain for sale, with the tablet industry projected to be a $70 billion market by 2014, according to the analysts at RBC. No target price, asking price or minimum bid has been set on the offer. "We are going to let the market determine the final sales price," says XF’s Aron Meystedt. "We feel the size and growth of this industry will drive the final sales price of Tablets.com up, however, we haven't set a target price yet," he added. "Once a bid comes across that we feel is fair for this opportunity, we will accept it and move forward." The company also noted that recent sales for other single word domain names like toys.com, clothes.com and sex.com have traded for 7 and 8 figure sums. And Citrix’s Cloud.com, which it acquired as a part of the $200 million purchase of Cloud.com earlier this year, was assigned a value of $18 million. At present, the tablets.com website is hosting a rolling odometer that’s meant to demonstrate how fast the tablets market is growing. As of this morning, it’s in the $37 billion range. Although not a household name, XF.com Investments is known for owning the first .com on the Internet: Symbolics.com. The company wasn’t the original owner of the domain, however – it bought it in August 2009 for an undisclosed sum. Originally, the domain belonged to defunct Massachusetts-based computer manufacturer Symbolics, which first registered it on March 15th, 1985.
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| Posted: 21 Nov 2011 06:16 AM PST  Raise your hand if you want a Microsoft Surface for a desk? Everyone, right? Of course. It’s the hottest thing out of Redmond since this picture set. But they’re damn expensive. There’s no way I’d use one for my desk. I spilled coffee on my desk just 10 minutes ago. Instead, if I was a member of the 1%, I’d buy a Surface and hang it on the wall. So you know, it was safe from me and my offspring. EXOpc has an alternative: the EXOdesk. It seems to have most of the Surface’s magic and it only costs $1,299. That’s within the price justification range of some of the 99 percenters! The EXOdesk is set for a CES 2012 debut but the company just released this teaser video. Stick with it. The video gets exponentially more interesting. EXOpc says it will only cost $1,299 when it’s released next year. Of course they’re not stating the hardware chops of the screen or computer just yet. But it at least looks awesome. With the current Surface incarnation, the Sasmung SUR40, costing $8,400, the lower-priced EXOdesk seems like a fun device even if it’s not as capable. We’ll no doubt seek out the EXOdesk at CES but in the mean time check out the teaser below.
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| Visa Teams Up With Shopkick To Dole Out Retailer Reward Points At The Point Of Sale Posted: 21 Nov 2011 04:59 AM PST  Visa is making a major move in the commerce and technology space, teaming up with Shopkick, an innovative geo-coupon system that has received funding from Kleiner Perkins, Greylock, SV Angel and others. The two companies will begin offering consumers a way to receive rewards points for retailers at the point of sale when they use their Visa credit cards. With the new partnership, called ‘Buy & Collect’, Shopkick users will get rewards (or ‘kicks’) for swiping their Visa debit or credit card at any one of six retailers, including ToysRus, Old Navy, Wet Seal, American Eagle, Simon Malls, and Arden B. Of course, to understand the nature of the new transaction, you need to understand how Shopkicks works. Instead of checking in, as you would with a geo app like Foursquare, Shopkick automatically recognizes when someone with the free Android or iPhone app on their phone walks into a store. Once a Shopkick Signal is detected, the app delivers reward points called “kickbucks” to the user for walking into a retail store, trying on clothes, scanning a barcode and other actions. Kickbucks can then be redeemed across all partner stores for gift card rewards or for Facebook Credits. User can also receive special discounts on specific products at partners stores like Macy’s, Best Buy or Target. National retail partners in the loyalty program include Target, Best Buy, Macy's, Crate & Barrel, Old Navy, American Eagle, Sports Authority, Toys R Us, Simon Malls and others, and 20 brands (P&G, Unilever, Kraft, Colgate, Clorox, Disney, HP, Intel). One of the retailers is estimating $50 million in measurable incremental revenue as a result of the shopkick mobile app. As Shopkick founder Cyriac Roeding explains to us, the first problem for a brick and mortar retailer is to get foot traffic, which Shopkick helps solve with its app. But the second and third problems are how to drive conversions while a consumer is in the store, and how to make sure the customer returns. “If we are part of the purchase transaction, we think we can see great results and early tests have proven so,” he says. Existing Shopkick app users will be automatically alerted to the availability of the new Buy & Collect program and those who are new to the app will be notified of this optional program. In order to start collecting Kicks at the point of sale, Shopkick users have to sign-up and link their Visa credit card or debit card once on the app or site and then any purchases using that card at participating stores will earn you Kicks (if you have a debit card, you need to use it as a credit card to receive Kicks). Shopkick app users who opt in to the Buy & Collect program will see a green payment card icon on their "nearby" screen to let them know there are additional offers at participating merchants. By tapping onto that merchant, they'll see the buy and collect offer such as "Spend $20, get 400 kicks" at the top of the page, while they are in the store. Consumers will get extra Kicks if you spend more than the average basket size at the store. Once you earn Kicks at a point of sale purchase, you’ll get a push notification on your phone automatically that will tell you how many Kicks you earned with your purchase. As Visa’s senior business leader for information products Leigh Amaro says, “This program is built around Visa’s strategy to personalize the shopping experience for consumers and, increase conversion rates and drive larger basket sizes for merchants…we have a commitment to using new technologies to enhance the shopping experience to consumer and add value to merchant.” Roeding says this is just the beginning, and intends to expand the partnership to other retailers. “Walk in rewards are important, but the combination of walk-in rewards and purchases is killer combo,” he says. Since the Shopkick’s launch in August 2010, the app has seen a whopping 700 million product views, and the startup expects to pass 1 billion product views this year. There have been over 2 million physical walk-ins to stores (which are measured from the Shopkick signal device installed at the store). The device is installed at 3000 large stores and 250 malls now, and even landed a lucrative deal with the CW network. Shopkick users open the apps on average on 14 days per month (often several times a day). Each day they open the app, they look at 16 stores on average. That means, per month they look at over 200 stores via the app on average. And users have scanned 7 million products over the past year, which is up from 3 million in February. There’s no doubt that part of the future of commerce is in closing the redemption loop. As we wrote previously, the redemption loop starts when a consumer sees an ad or an offer for a merchant, and is completed when the consumer makes a purchase and that purchase can be tracked back to the offer. And technology companies are catching on to this. And credit card companies are an integral part of this experience. For example, Foursquare and Facebook have also formed separate partnerships with credit card company American Express. Earlier this year, Visa launched a location-based deal deal with the Gap to serve offers. The future of commerce will be combining purchase data with innovative technologies like Shopkick’s to help close the reception loop and encourage consumers to purchase again at retailers. And as the holiday shopping season takes off, there’s no better time for Shopkick, retailers and Visa to give consumers an incentive to swipe a little more (and more frequently).
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| Turn Pizza Boxes Into Computer Interfaces With “Invoked Computing” (Video) Posted: 21 Nov 2011 04:25 AM PST  Would you like to be able to turn your pizza box into a computer interface or use a banana as an alternative to your phone? Invoked Computing, a concept developed at the Ishikawa-Oku lab at Tokyo University, makes that possible via “ubiquitous” augmented reality (video and sound). The idea here is to project screens, keyboards and other elements on everyday objects so users ideally wouldn’t need specific hardware anymore. These “augmented” objects can be anything (like the mentioned pizza box or phone) and can be manipulated, for example by touching the projected volume bar on the pizza box and moving the finger up and down to adjust volume in the real world. Lead researcher Alexis Zerroug explains:
Diginfo TV recently shot a video with Zerroug in which he explains the latest status of the Invoked Computing project:
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| Sumitomo Chemical Reports Breakthrough In Large-Sized OLED TV Mass-Production Posted: 21 Nov 2011 03:10 AM PST  Small OLED screens are being used in millions of devices already (like in Samsung’s Galaxy S phones or Sony’s upcoming portable console Vita), but we’re still waiting for large-sized models to hit the mainstream. It’s been four years since Sony offered the XEL-1 (a mini OLED TV) in stores, but the industry has been innovating on LCD screens, for example with LED backlight or 3D, since. One of the biggest problems is cost: producing big OLED screens has simply been too expensive so far. But now Japan-based Sumitomo Chemical has reportedly developed a technology that makes it possible to mass-produce large OLED TVs at reasonable prices. According to Japanese biggest business newspaper The Nikkei, Sumitomo uses macro-molecule materials as the main OEL component instead of low-molecular materials that are being used currently (and cost more to produce). As a result, production costs are said to be reduced by up to 50%. Sumitomo is ready to set up a production facility for the new materials by the end of this year in Osaka before starting production in early 2012. The company expects the annual output to be enough for the production of four to five million TVs sized at 40 inches. It will offer the materials to TV makers in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan.
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| Gadgets Week in Review: Surface Time Posted: 21 Nov 2011 01:00 AM PST  Here are some of the past week’s stories on TechCrunch Gadgets: TouchPad Microwave Hack Finds Videos That End Right When The Popcorn Is Ready Students Hack The Kinect To Allow Blind To Navigate Microsoft And Samsung's Surface 2 Now Up For Pre-Order Aerial 3D: Amazing System Shows 3D Objects In Mid-Air, With No Screen (Video)
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