Clothes Horse Wants To Solve The Biggest Problem With Online Shopping: Finding Clothes That Fit
 Clothes Horse, a fashion technology company based out of New York, is publicly launching its platform today in an attempt to address one of the biggest challenges facing online shoppers: buying clothes that fit. Through the use of a customizable widget that merchants add to their own websites, Clothes Horse can determine within just 30 seconds how the retailers' items will fit any customer. The goal is not only to decrease shopping cart abandonment, but also the rate of returns due to ill-fitting clothes.
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The Winners Of This Year’s $100,000 TechFellow Awards Are…
 Tonight, Silicon Valley's heroes gave competition a rest and joined together to celebrate the spirit of innovation. An all-star committee of tech moguls carefully considered your nominations of visionaries in the fields Engineering Leadership, Product Design and Marketing, General Management, and Disruptive Innovation. They chose 5 leaders per category and awarded them each a $100,000 grant to invest in a startup of their choice.
Here are the winner's of this year's TechFellow Awards: |
San Francisco Launches The 2012 Innovation Portfolio, From Open Taxi Data To Beta Tests In City Hall
 San Francisco may not have intended to be become the startup mecca that it is today, but now the city government is working hard to make itself as friendly as possible to tech entrepreneurs. Makes sense, considering that there are 1,539 tech companies and 30,000 tech jobs in the city now -- a number that's been growing fast as older industries like high finance continue to suffer through the recession.
What that means is this. Mayor Ed Lee, who came to power last year with heavy support from the local tech scene, is announcing a new initiative today at the TechFellows awards ceremony, that has some intriguing ideas for making the city itself more relevant to the booming industry within it. |
OnLive Adds “Cloud-Accelerated Browsing” To Its Streaming-Desktop Stable
 You're probably familiar with OnLive, the company that made its mark by streaming brand new console and PC games to whatever devices could support a high-bandwidth video stream. Many doubted its technology to begin with (including yours truly - Is OnLive OnCrack?) but they've more or less delivered on their promises, and have also been expanding the services they offer. Most recently they introduced OnLive Desktop, which streamed a Windows 7 desktop to your iPad.
That was mainly focused on productivity - Office apps and such. Now they've added web browsing to the table. Yes, they will stream live video of a web browser running in a datacenter to your device, which almost certainly already has a web browser. |
Browser Shootout Shows Minor Variations In Performance – It’s Still A Matter Of Taste
 The browser wars are in a tense state of suspension right now. The once-obvious advantages of one and disadvantages of another can't be counted on as much as they could a year ago, and fast-changing standards and interaction methods have produced a sort of uneasy détente while everyone awaits the browser equivalent of the Manhattan Project to catapult them into the atomic age.
Tom's Hardware just did a nice, thorough examination of the available browsers on Windows 7 and Ubuntu, and the findings are really mixed. It used to be that Firefox always won, and we could all make fun of IE. Then Chrome came and won all the speed benchmarks. And then there was Opera. Now it's a mess. How do you pick the browser that's best for you? Easy: you flip a coin. |
As Journalists And Video Bloggers Are Killed, SyriaPioneer Lives On
 It goes without saying that the death of veteran Sunday Times war correspondent Marie Colvin and the French photographer Remi Ochlik - after an artillery shell hit their makeshift press centre in the Syrian city of Homs - is tragic. It's also testament to the lengths to which journalists often go to get the story. But equally, the use of new technology by 'citizen journalists' has been equally significant in documenting the deadly acts of the Syrian government against its own people.
Among those killed in yesterday's attack on the journalists' position were three activists. One of those was video blogger Rami Ahmad al-Sayed, who was also known as "Syria Pioneer". Ahmad al-Sayed had uploaded over 200 videos to various platforms of the killing and destruction in his area. We wrote about him and his video only this week when the Syrian government blocked Bambuser, the live video platform he was using. |
Apple, Google, And Others Agree To Mobile App Privacy Policy Guidelines
 Though Apple, Google, Microsoft, RIM, Amazon, and HP don't always see eye-to-eye, the six of them have entered into an agreement brokered by California Attorney General Kamala Harris to take a tougher stance on the issue of mobile privacy.
Going forward, the six companies involved must provide users with a privacy policy if the app in question collects personal information. Though the move will affect the app submission and downloading process for users the world over, it was designed to bring those six companies into compliance with California state law.
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First Floor Labs Sold A Company To Facebook, Graduated Three YC Startups, And Is Accepting Applications
 Last Friday I visited the Aol* building on Page Mill Road in Palo Alto. But instead of the stench of death and decay you would normally find at a dying company, I found joy and the hustle and bustle of youth. More importantly, I found startups, tens of startups with founders eager to show me around the various VC firms (SoftTech, Morado) and incubators occupying the building's first floor. |
#1 FB Dating App Zoosk’s New Model: Seducing Couples With Advice and Date Discounts
 Every time a dating site succeeds in making a match, it loses two users. To offset churn, Zoosk tells me that tomorrow it's announcing a new business model that complements subscriptions with date discounts, expert relationship advice, gift ideas, holiday reminders and online scrapbooks.
The products could convince users to pay even after they've found their sweethearts. If users fall in love with the new revenue streams, the whole dating industry could start courting happy couples. |
Hack Makes Nook Touch E-Ink Display Almost As Responsive As LCD
 As you probably know, bistable or passive displays like the E-Ink ones in e-readers focus on battery life and readability rather than color and interactivity. The latest devices have been optimized for fast page refreshes and touch operation, but generally you're still waiting a half a second or so for the screen to flip over to the next page, menu, or what have you.
But that's not all they're capable of. We've seen hacks before, but this one definitely takes the cake. |
HP Q1 Revenue Down 7 Percent To $30B, Net Income Down 44 Percent, Software Sales Up 30 Percent
 HP just reported mixed first quarter earnings. The company posted non-GAAP diluted earnings per share of $0.92, down 32 percent from the prior-year period (GAAP diluted earnings per share were $0.73, down 38 percent from the prior-year period). First quarter net revenue came in at $30.0 billion, down 7 percent from the previous year. Analysts expected earnings of $0.87 cents a share on revenue of $30.7 billion. GAAP Net Income was down 44 percent to $1.5 billion.
"In the first quarter, we delivered on our Q1 outlook and remained focused on the fundamentals to drive long-term sustainable returns," Meg Whitman, HP president and chief executive officer, said in a statement. "We are taking the necessary steps to improve execution, increase effectiveness and capitalize on emerging opportunities to reassert HP’s technology leadership." |
AdRoll Hires Google Sales Director Suresh Khanna
 Aiming to become one of the giants of online advertising, ad retargeting startup AdRoll has hired Googler Suresh Khanna as its vice president of sales.
In nearly six years at Google, Khanna held a number of roles. Most recently, he was director of new advertiser sales, where he says he led the North American team for acquiring mid-market and larger advertisers. Until now, Khanna says AdRoll hasn't had anyone focused on building out the sales team, so one of his big goals is to "attract rock stars." He also says that he wants to help AdRoll build relationships with larger advertisers and ad agencies. |
Tabber Adds An LED Light Show To Any Guitar
 Tabber is an upcoming Kickstarter project that essentially adds an LED light show to your guitar and, more importantly, allows you to learn to play chords and solos by following the lights on the fretboard.
The idea is definitely not new. The Fretlight guitar beat these guys to the punch and I wonder what patent issues they will have to deal with. However, as an idea, it's pretty ingenious. The Tabber is a "sleeve" that fits over the neck of your guitar and it should work, as the folks at Tabber reiterate, on any git-fiddle in your possession.
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Sociable Labs’ EverShare Adds FB Auto-Sharing And Pinterest Boards To Any Site
 Referral traffic is spilling out of both Pinterest and Facebook's Open Graph frictionless sharing. With Sociable Lab's licensable EverShare you can snatch their functionality without any serious development work and soak up some page views. EverShare lets you host your own Pinterest-style product or content boards to give your users their social curation fix. It also instantly roots your site into Facebook's confusing APIs so purchases, comments, reviews, and pins are automatically blasted at friends of your visitors.
Great websites steal, they don't borrow.
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The Tesla Bricking Story? It’s Nonsense
 Here's a fun fact: Batteries and cars require maintenance. The Tesla Roadster runs on batteries that also require maintenance. Out of the 2,200 Roadster owners, apparently at least five didn't read the manual on their new toy and let the car sit off the charger for several months -- or so says one regional service manager. This is a no-no according to Tesla. The result? The battery packs completely died and needed to be replaced at the owner's expense.
This is not unique to the $100k Tesla Roadster. Batteries stop working without a charge. It just so happens that the battery pack in question isn't a $100 laptop battery. The latest owner with a bricked Tesla is reportedly going to have to pay $40,000 to replace the battery pack in his Roadster. |
New Update Brings Collaborative Editing To Google Docs Android App
It's safe to say we've all been in a situation where a few extra pairs of eyes could come in handy, and the folks at Google know just how that feels. In an effort to give people that backup when they need it, they've just pushed out a useful new update to the Google Docs Android app. |
New From The Makers Of Nosh: NoshList, A Free Waitlisting App For Restaurants
 Firespotter Labs, makers of the food photo-sharing app Nosh (and more recently, the hilarious spoof app Jotly), is launching its latest creation today called NoshList, a new waitlisting application for restaurants. The app, designed for the iPad, ties into to the company's consumer-facing Nosh mobile app, which allows users to rate and review restaurants and dishes from their mobile phones. |
WinZip iOS App Tops 500K Downloads In 8 Days
 The WinZip iOS app, which lets you crack open .zip files from your iDevice, has only spent a short time on the App Store (and by short, I mean, like, a week). But there's already plenty to brag about.
The app saw over 30,000 downloads on Day One, and nearly 150,000 on Day Two. As of last night, WinZip has blown by the 500,000 download hurdle with approximately 512,000 installs.
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500px Rolls Out New Browsing And Sharing Features – Plus A Market
 Upstart photo-sharing service 500px is bringing some significant changes to the site that should be going live right now (although they're being hammered, so be patient). The site was already one of the frontrunners as far as design and user uptake, and these new features should help that right along.
There's a new curated and social photo stream called "Flow" and a new layout for photo sets that can, like the excellent The Big Picture (or In Focus, of course), be used to tell a story. And perhaps most significantly, they've added a full-on market, allowing people to buy and sell photos digitally or in print. |
Pastebin Upgrades Service, Adds Private Pastes (All While Being Under Attack)
 Everyone's favorite way to share thousands of pages of sensitive information (and dump PHP code that you might use later) has upgraded to what it's calling version 3.1. This new version, in addition to some cosmetic changes, includes one major upgrade: private pastes.
The system currently supports public and "unlisted" pastes - two types excellent for anonymous sharing - but the private pastes require users to create an account with the service. Private pastes are truly private while unlisted pastes simply don't show up in search results or on Pastebin's popular paste list.
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