Daily Digest from John & Todd for 05/17/2011
Startup Spotlight: Art Sumo tracks down cool art all over the world (so you don't have to)
May 17, 2011 10:49 am | John Cook Startup ideas strike at all different times, and in all different places. For Naysawn Naderi, inspiration hit when he bumped into an artist while roaming the streets of New Delhi. A computer engineer who studied at McGill University in Montreal, Naderi later quit his day job at Microsoft and formed Art Sumo based on that chance... Read More...
State university computer science faculty fear deeper cuts as pressure builds on WWU
May 17, 2011 10:11 am | John Cook Western Washington University’s computer science department isn’t the only one encountering the harsh realities of the state budget crisis. Eastern Washington University is currently evaluating its graduate program in computer science, though chair of the department, Paul Schimpf, said he’s confident it will survive based on a committee’s recent recommendation to the president and provost.... Read More...
Microsoft customer satisfaction hits new high as Windows 7 takes hold
May 17, 2011 09:39 am | Todd Bishop Have we finally witnessed the death of the Blue Screen of Death? OK, so that’s still a bit of a reach, but new numbers this morning from the American Customer Satisfaction Index show satisfaction with Microsoft software reaching a new peak of 78 on the 100-point ASCI index. That’s up from a trough of 69 in... Read More...
Expedia boosts stake in Chinese travel site eLong
May 17, 2011 08:53 am | John Cook Expedia is investing $41 million in eLong, the second biggest online travel company in China, as part of an effort for the Bellevue company to get a bigger foothold in the country. Expedia had already owned a portion of the 12-year-old company, and with the latest investment it now owns a 56 percent share. In... Read More...
Meet Marcy: An original Web comedy from Lockerz
May 17, 2011 08:25 am | John Cook Lockerz just scored $30 million in venture capital financing from the likes of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and former Microsoft CFO Greg Maffei. And how is the Seattle social networking upstart — geared toward teens and twenty somethings– using some of that cash? Well, meet Marcy. That’s the title character of a new original comedy... Read More...
Socrata unveils the new data.gov, opening vault on government data
May 17, 2011 07:49 am | John Cook At the Technology Alliance annual luncheon in Seattle earlier this month, U.S. Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra explained how the open government movement was “collapsing a lot of the complexity” that had previously made federal, state and local collaboration difficult. In particular, Chopra called out the efforts of Seattle startup Socrata, which is helping bring... Read More...
What's that sound? It might be the IPO pipeline filling up
May 16, 2011 11:58 pm | John Cook We’ve finally seen a bit of activity on the IPO front in Seattle, with both Impinj and Zillow.com filing for public offerings late last month. As it turns out, they are not alone. The first quarter ended with 125 companies in the IPO pipeline, a significant uptick compared to the 80 companies registered for the... Read More...
Myhrvold's Intellectual Ventures distances itself from iOS in-app patent dustup
May 16, 2011 06:24 pm | Todd Bishop Bellevue-based Intellectual Ventures, the patent holding company and invention house run by former Microsoft technology chief Nathan Myhrvold, confirmed today that it once owned the patent at the center of a controversy over in-app purchasing in third-party iOS applications. To be clear, that would be past tense. A spokeswoman for the company tells GeekWire that... Read More...
Latest on Amazon tablets: Code names, processors and bigger offices near Apple?
May 16, 2011 04:04 pm | Todd Bishop Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has all but acknowledged that the company is coming out with its own multipurpose tablet computer — telling Consumer Reports last week to “stay tuned” when he was asked about the rumors. "We will always be very mindful that we will want a dedicated reading device," he told the magazine. "In... Read More...
Old relationships pay off: Divergent sees big return on $327M Pliant buy
May 16, 2011 03:10 pm | John Cook Divergent Ventures, a small Seattle venture capital firm, saw a big payoff today when Milipitas, California data storage drive company Pliant sold to SanDisk for $327 million. It marks the biggest return for Divergent since the firm was formed five years ago, with partner Rob Shurtleff saying that they made six times their invested capital.... Read More...
Microsoft Bing gets a little more help from our Facebook friends
May 16, 2011 01:36 pm | Todd Bishop Microsoft Bing is rolling out a new wave of Facebook integration across its search results starting today, tapping data from the widely used social network to show searchers which sites, news stories, movies, products and other items their friends have liked. The feature shows up as an annotation on individual search results. For example, searching... Read More...
Q&A: Starbucks mobile exec on Android, mobile ordering
May 16, 2011 01:28 pm | John Cook At some point in the future, you may be able to order that Mocha Coconut Frappucinno from your mobile phone. Mobile ordering is just one of the areas where Starbucks is spending some time experimenting, listening to customers and trying to deliver the right solutions. K.C. MacLaren, director of mobile and emerging platforms at Starbucks,... Read More...
Are iPads mobile devices? A few experts weigh in
May 16, 2011 12:17 pm | John Cook Are iPads and other tablet computers mobile devices? That was one of the lively discussions today at the MobileNorthwest conference in Seattle. Starbucks director of mobile K.C. MacLaren got things rolling in a morning keynote when he said that tablets are not considered mobile devices in his mind given their large form factor. MacLaren’s remarks led to... Read More...
Practical Nerd: Privacy vs. stupidity, a case study
May 16, 2011 11:34 am | Frank Catalano This one goes out to you, Herbert. And to you, Phil. And yes, even you, Correspondent-Who-Will-Not-Be-Named. I'm afraid you're all idiots. Because you are case studies showing that no matter how fervent the hue and cry is about Facebook's privacy policies or tracking cookie abuse by marketers, a major threat to individuals' privacy — and... Read More...
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