Continue reading ST-Ericsson's U8500 platform gives your next smartphone wicked 3D powers

Filed under: Cellphones, Portable Video

ST-Ericsson's U8500 platform gives your next smartphone wicked 3D powers originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 04 Nov 2009 17:13:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

The new company caught our interest when we learned that AOL’s former chief life streamer David Liu had invested in the company. Stump and Galligan declined to comment on the company just yet (they’ll be launching at Under The Radar next month) but we were able to glean some information from Under The Radar’s directory of presenters.

SimpleGeo is ready-to-use location infrastructure. They currently have three products: a geo-spatial Context Engine, Storage Engine and a comprehensive SDK. The SimpleGeo Context Engine enables application developers to quickly and easily get relevant information about specific locales including (but not limited to) ZIP codes, real-time weather, and geo-tagged media. Additionally, the SimpleGeo Storage Engine makes it possible to store and query location data in a scalable fashion, as well as perform complicated geospatial operations effortlessly.

Located in Boulder, CO

It sounds like SimpleGeo is looking to become something analogous to an “AWS for location”. And that may well be a very smart move — Location based services are clearly about to explode as more mobile devices support GPS and fast internet connections. And you can be sure that the new startups and services that emerge won’t want to have to reinvent the wheel whenever they want to integrate location into their app. We’ll be keeping an eye for more on this one soon.

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Jason Fried of 37Signals has taken the stage at Y-Combinator’s Startup School this morning at UC Berkeley. I’m taking my notes below on his talk.

Fried has started off by talking about bootstrapping startups. Startups that bootstrap are more “money hungry” then companies that are funded. If you are a funded company, you generally have money to spend that investors encourage you to spend as well. If you’re a bootstrapped company, you’re hungry to make money.

Fried also talked about the art of making money. He mentioned that making money is like playing the piano. If you started playing piano at 5, you have a lot of time to practice playing piano to get better. If you want to be a good piano player, you start young, and you practice. Same goes with making money. It’s a skill and a talent. The more practice you have making money, the more successful you’ll be.

Fried also used an interested analogy to crack cocaine, comparing crack to funding. Crack is like funding, because it’s addictive. Investors want you to come back for money — they want you to be addicted to the money.

One of the major points Fried mentioned is picking the right price. You have to find the right price to sell your products to consumers. Customers will pay if it’s worth it. Don’t make products that aren’t useful for others — you have to have people using your product, and if they use it, charge for it.

Thing will go wrong as well. Be real and honest about your mistakes. Also, you don’t have to be in Silicon Valley to be successful. Fried mentioned that 37Signals is based in Chicago, but they have employees all over the world. Location doesn’t matter to build great products. You’ll know if you have a great product if people use it.

Q: How do you know if your product is useful for a lot of people?
A:Build something you would use yourself. When you put stuff out for free everyone goes “ah, that’s cool.” Put a price on it, then you figure out if it’s really useful.

Q: Regarding virtual offices.
A: Need to find a good team. People who can work from their home a lot. We’re in touch all day using our tools, but you can put that away if you need to. You can’t put a ‘real’ office away like that. But some face time is essential sometimes. Should be the exception not the rule.

Q: Pricing?
A: First question is ‘would I pay for it?’ It’s a science. You have to worry about margins. Walmart doesn’t use 9s for their prices. They do 8. But for me, is it worth paying for. We have multiple tiers. Every price point is double, but you get more than twice as much in each tier.

Q: I’m a scientist, skeptical about luck.
A: I think luck plays a part somewhere. BUt I think for the most part make your own success. You can’t wait for something lucky to happen. Maybe timing/meeting right person is luck. I think it’s the kind thing to say, PC to say. But I think if you ask people honestly they won’t say that.

Q: How long did it take you from having idea to launching paid project?
A: We launched basecamp as a side project. We were a web design company at the time. We made it in a few months, then we put a price on it. Built it for ourselves, we needed it for ourselves. Hit $5k a month in about six weeks, has since increased. We don’t share exact rev numbers. Job wars made 1.5 mi. book material about a million. Advance from new book is handsome. We make millions in rev and profits. We did take one investment in 2006. We bootstrapped. We didn’t need the money (from Jeff Bezos). We did it for liquidity and someone like Jeff available, he’s built a business from scratch.

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Even though it is embroiled in a nasty legal battle with its founders over its future, Skype continues to rack up impressive numbers. In today’s third quarter earnings from eBay (which still owns Skype, but is preparing to unload it), the company breaks out Skype’s performance (see slide above).

Skype’s registered users grew 41 percent to 521 million people. That’s a stunning 40 million new registered users in the past three months. Revenues grew 29 percent to $185 million. Free Skype-to-Skype minutes grew 74 percent to 27.7 billion minutes, whereas SkypeOut minutes (which is what members pay for) grew 44 percent to 3.1 billion minutes.

All of those SkypeOut calls translated to a healthy $185 million in revenues, up 29 percent from a year ago. If it keeps up at this pace, it should easily be able to exceed its $1 billion annual revenue goal by 2011.

Skype was one of the few bright spots in eBay’s earnings, along with Paypal, which brought in $688 million in revenues (up 15 percent). eBay’s bread-and-butter marketplaces business was down 1 percent to $1.365 billion.

eBay Q309EarningsSlides FINAL

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Filed under: Cellphones

Mysterious HTC Android phone spied, might lean the way of the Dragon originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 18 Oct 2009 19:52:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

If you missed the company’s great demo at TC50, here’s how it works: RedBeacon has spent the last few weeks building out a directory of local service providers, which encompass everything from Accountants to Yard Workers and unskilled labor (Cofounder Ethan Anderson says it already includes providers from several hundred categories, including video editors, makeup artists, personal trainers, and many more).

Beginning today, users will be able to submit requests to these providers for whatever it is they need done. Need to tidy up a house in time for dinner? Submit a RedBeacon request for a Maid. Want some cookies baked by the weekend? Sign up for a baker, and so on. Each time you submit a request, RedBeacon creates an auction and alerts providers that there is an available job. These providers quote prices for the job in question, which you can see appearing in real time (providers can also ask you follow-up questions if they need more details). Once you find a provider and price you like, you can end the auction and schedule the job.

I just tried setting up an order, and found the process to be quite easy. To begin with, RedBeacon asks you to type in whatever kind of service you’re looking for. As you type, it presents a list of matching options (so “Tutor” would bring up results for “Biology Tutor, Math Tutor, and teachers for a host of other subjects). The site also uses some intelligence to help match similar job categories (a query for “Transcriptionist” will suggest “Typist”).

For our example, I decided to try ordering some cupcakes for delivery from Kara’s, a premium cupcake maker about a mile away from TechCrunch HQ. I began by typing in “Delivery person”, which the site changed to a more appropriate “Courier”. I filled out the job description with some more details and our address. The site offers two options for timing: you can either send out a RedBeacon Alert, which notifies providers in the area that there’s a job to be done immediately, or you can schedule it if you’d like to give more providers time to respond. (I chose Alert) After that, I was done — the site is currently polling local providers to see if they’d like to bring TechCrunch some cupcakes. I’ll update with the results later on.

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FollowMe’s motorized tilting front panel can be adjusted up to 30 degrees to reduce sun glare, and hides the CD slot. You’ve got an optional iPod connection kit (costs extra) that brings your GUI to the dash, and if you remove your navigator you can still use all the other functions of FollowMe.

FollowMe – which really resembles an Eclipse AVN2210p by the way – uses a built-in gyroscope and accelerometer that calculates vehicle speed and direction, even in tunnels where satellite signals generally drop out… via

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Toyota and TomTom take Australia

Mio P520G netbook comes with a SIM card slot right under the battery so you’ve also got the 3G modem as an option.

Here are some more specs on P520G:

• Integrated GPS receiver
• Intel Atom N270 CPU @1.6GHz
• 1GB DDR2 RAM
• WiFi
• LCD 8.9″ WSVGA resolution (1024×600 pixels)
• 3G (optional)
• Bluetooth
• Webcam
• 3-cell battery

We don’t know when Mio netbooks are going to come to the States side but we can’t wait. We’ll be sure to let you know… via

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Mio P520G netbook with GPS