via guestofaguest.com: We all secretly think that our taste in music is some magic map of our hidden depths, but when we actually have the opportunity to show someone what’s on our iPod, it’s Bon Jovi or a podcast on how to get gum out of your beard. That’s why the honesty displayed by the New Yorkers in this video is both delightful and refreshing. MORE>>
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Earlier this year, we brought you the thrilling eyewitness news of a mystery Paris Hilton in a cop cruiser sighting, deep in the heart in West Hollywood. At the time, we reported that we didn’t know why Paris was seen riding in a WeHo cop car, then we told you that we heard she was filming a PSA as part of her court-ordered community service. But yesterday, we learned that we didn’t have it quite right either time. As it turns out, Paris was filming a segment for a brand-new, celebrity-soaked documentary whose trailer premiered last weekend at the Cannes Film Festival. The subject? L.A.’s wildest, most legendary slice of road: The Sunset Strip. Read the full story
via hamptons.guestofaguest: The Music To Know festival, coming to East Hampton in mid-August, has announced their line-up! Some 9,600 concert goers will have the pleasure of hearing Cold War Kids, Matt and Kim, M. Ward, Chromeo, Vampire Weekend and more. We’ve got details… MORE>>>
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While Microsoft (MSFT) this morning was explaining its $8.5 billion bid for Skype, Google (GOOG) was hosting an event in San Francisco called “I/O“, during which the company made several announcements pertaining to its mobile devices.
Total activated “Android”-based mobile devices now number 100 million, the company said, with 400,000 being turned on every day. There 200,000 “apps” available for the devices, the company said, of which 4.5 billion installations have taken place on Android devices.
The company plans later this year to introduce the next version of Android for phones, dubbed “Ice Cream Sandwich,” which will incorporate “everything you love” about the company’s “Honeycomb” version shipping on tablets, such as Motorola Mobility’s (MMI) “Xoom.” That includes the “holographic” user interface.
Similar to Amazon.com’s (AMZN) hosted music service, Google started up today the beta version of its music site, to let Android users upload their music collection and stream it to the phone. The company also started rentals of movies to users of the Xoom today, with availability for Android version 2.2 users “in coming weeks.” The rentals are priced at $1.99.
Google also said it formed a committee of handset makers and service providers to to coordinate when devices are updated with the last Android software and for how long those devices will continue to be updated. Verizon Communications (VZ), Samsung (SSNLF), HTC, Sprint-Nextel (S), Sony Ericsson, LG Electronics (LGERF), Vodafone (VOD), T-Mobile, Motorola, and AT&T (T) are among the initial committee members.
Google unveiled something called “Android @ Home” that will let Android-based devices control devices in the home. Part of that is a blueprint for a kind of home “hub” or server for connectivity, called “Project Tungsten.” In a demo at the conference, Google showed how a music CD with a wireless tag placed in front of a receiver can suck all the songs off the CD and start playing them back over the network.
Google shares today are up $5, or almost 1%, at $542.68.
Article courtesy of Tech Trader Daily
It looks like investors think there’s real money in e-reading — at least, judging from the $50 million round just raised by e-reading startup Kobo.
The company offers its own e-reading devices (the Kobo eReader and the Kobo Wireless eReader), as well as apps for a wide range of other platforms, including the iPad, iPhone, Blackberry, and Android. It has also partnered with Samsung, Research in Motion, and HTC to supply the e-reading application for their tablet devices.
And even though it may be less well-known than competitors like Apple (with its iBooks app) and Amazon, Kobo seems to be growing fast, with 3.2 million users, including 1 million added in the last 90 days.
The round was led by undisclosed institutional investor, with funding also coming from past backers Indigo Books & Music, Cheung Kong Holdings, and others. Toronto-based Kobo said it wants to use money to expand internationally (last week it announced plans to open localized versions of its e-book store for Germany and Spain) and to launch new products.
This is the largest round I’ve seen for an e-book company, but the area has already attracted some leading investors. For example, digital textbook maker Inkling’s investors include Sequoia Capital, while Callaway Digital Arts, which creates e-books that are enriched for iPads, has raised money from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.
Companies: Cheung Kong Holdings, Indigo Books & Music, Kobo
Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals
Intel is taking on arch rival ARM today with the launch of new Intel Atom chips for tablet computers.
The Atom is a low-power version of Intel’s computer chips, and it is aimed squarely at tablets, netbooks, and smartphones. It represents the chip giant’s best chance to catch up with ARM, which dominates the mobile space with its power-efficient chip architecture and dozens of chip design partners.
Code-named Oak Trail, the new Intel Atom Z670 processor will appear in 35 tablet computers and other mobile devices this year, said Bill Kircos, general manager of marketing for Intel’s netbook and tablet group, in an interview.
The battle between Intel and ARM is the biggest collision in the entire semiconductor industry. With Atom, Intel is trying to extend its PC hegemony into tablets and smartphones. But ARM has the upper hand, since it started with a low-power architecture and is already built into billions of low-power devices such as ordinary cell phones. ARM is moving up into the computer-like tablet and smartphone devices.
While Intel is the world’s largest chip maker, it has to compete against ARM’s army. ARM doesn’t make chips itself. It designs a general architecture. Its licensees such as Qualcomm, Marvell, Broadcom, and Nvidia design chips based on the architecture that are used in mobile devices.
Intel’s Atom chips are becoming more power efficient with each generation. Kircos said that Intel will use its manufacturing muscle to accelerate its attack on ARM by leaping to new technology faster. The Oak Trail chips are made with 45-nanometer manufacturing. (A nanometer is a billionth of a meter). Intel will make the Cedar Trail chips with 32-nanometer technology. Each time it makes such a leap in manufacturing, Intel can build its circuitry smaller, resulting in faster, smaller, cheaper, and less power-hungry chips.
The Oak Trail chip, for instance, is 60 percent smaller (and therefore about 60 percent cheaper to make) than the previous generation Atom. For consumers, the new chips will deliver features such as smaller, thinner, fanless devices that can last a day on battery power.
That rate of introduction shows that Intel is moving faster than Moore’s Law, Kircos said. Moore’s Law, postulated in 1965 by Intel Chairman Emeritus Gordon Moore, predicts that chip capacity will double every two years. Intel is trying to double that pace so that it can double its chip capacity and other features every year at least for the Atom product line.
In 2013, Intel will launch a 22-nanometer Atom chip. Normally, chip makers move to a new manufacturing technology every couple of years. But by putting out a new Atom chip on a new manufacturing process three years in a row, Intel is showing that it is dead serious about staying ahead of ARM. To match Intel’s effort, ARM’s partners will have to invest billions of dollars in their own chip factories.
Customers using Oak Trail include Evolve III, Fujitsu, Lenovo, Motion Computing, Razer and Viliv. New tablets with the Intel chips will start shipping in May. Then, later this year, Intel will debut new Atom chips code-named Cedar Trail. Those chips for the netbook and entry-level desktop markets will appear in the second half of 2011.
The Intel Atom Z670 is a single-core (one brain) chip that runs at 1.5 gigahertz. Kircos said the exact battery life will depend on actual tablets, but most of the new tablets using the new Atom will be able to run a full day on one battery charge.
Not only will the new chips have better media, graphics, and power consumption. The Cedar Trail chips will have features such as Intel Wireless Music (which lets you play music anywhere in the home), Intel Wireless Display (for displaying a mobile device’s screen on a big-screen TV), PC Synch (for synchronizing with a PC), and Fast Boot (for starting instantly).
The new Atom chip, unveiled at the Intel Developer Forum event in Beijing today, will give customers a choice of operating systems. It will run on Google Chrome and Android, MeeGo, and Windows operating systems. The Z670 chip will have faster video playback, fast internet browsing, and longer battery life. It can play 1080p video, and it supports high-definition multimedia interface (HDMI) and Adobe Flash for rich animations.
Tags: Atom, Cedar Trail, Intel Atom Z670, low power, microprocessor, Oak Trail, smartphones, tablet computers, tablets
Companies: Arm, Intel, Microsoft
People: Bill Kircos
Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals
I’ve never asked for your sympathy. Writing about pop culture and making fun of party photos is a pretty great gig, after all, and is a lot less stressful than, for example, teaching elementary school. So I don’t, as a rule, tell people to feel sorry for me. But today, you probably wouldn’t want to switch places with me, because I just had to listen to Orange County 8th grader Rebecca Black‘s inexplicably popular (note: anyone who uses the word “buzzworthy” should be hunted down and beaten without mercy) YouTube single “Friday” four times in a row in order to write this post. And I’m about to play it again. May God have mercy on my soul. Read the full story
European streaming music startup Spotify is raising a big round of financing from Russia’s DST, the investment company that has backed Facebook, Groupon and Zynga.
If it is raising a big round, then the company may very well join the club of extremely valuable tech startups in an age when big private equity companies such as DST are willing to provide them with lots of money in lieu of an initial public offering. DST is the lead investor in the deal, which could include other investors.
Spotify provides cloud-based streaming music in Europe. But it hasn’t entered the US market, even though rival Apple has purchased the Lala music streaming service and is expected to come out with its own music streaming service. Music streaming is considered more appealing than the iTunes download model, since users can listen to their music anywhere.
The deal values the London-based company at about $1 billion, according to TechCrunch. The round may be $100 million or more, TechCrunch said, citing anonymous sources. The company has raised $112 million to date, including a small round a year ago from Founders Fund.
DST has written huge checks at very high valuations, but the company headed by Yuri Milner has proven very shrewd. It’s Facebook investment, for instance, has skyrocketed in value since DST bought the Facebook shares.
Tags: streaming music
Companies: Apple, DST, Facebook, spotify, Zynga
People: Yuri Milner
Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals
TuneUp Media, the company promising to provide the right information for the mislabeled and untitled songs in your music library, just announced that it has raised another $2 million of funding.
San Francisco-based TuneUp offers a plug-in for iTunes and Windows Media Player that identifies songs based on their “acoustic fingerprint.” The company says it has more than 3 million users who have used TuneUp to clean more than 1.5 billion tracks.
In addition to the core “clean up” ability, TuneUp has been adding features like music videos and concert alerts. TuneUp launched two of those additions, DeDuper for eliminating duplicate tracks and Lyrics for finding lyrics to a song, last September at the DEMO conference co-produced by VentureBeat.
The company also announced its $4.3 million round from IDG Ventures and KPG Ventures at the conference. With today’s announcement, IDG has added another $2 million to the round, bringing the total round size to $6.3 million and TuneUp’s total funding to $8.5 million.
Tags: iTunes, music library, Windows Media Player
Companies: Idg Ventures, TuneUp Media
Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals
We could never deny that we're pumped for Coachella 2011. Nevertheless, even we noticed that, in an era where the Kings of Leon are what passes for a rock n' roll headliner, the lineup lacks a certain edge.
Well, tell those limp-wristed indie rockers to take their Priuses with them whe[...]
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