"Comments are a dinner party. If I’ve invited you to have a seat at my table, at least have the courtesy to not call me an idiot for serving you food slightly different than you preferred or flinging the china at my dog <em>because that isn’t even the right color of dog anyway, duh</em>."
- Joel Johnson for ANIMAL on the poor standard--and bad manners--in comments
Michael Gartenberg has left his job as a tech analyst at Gartner Inc for a job at Apple. According to sources, Gartenberg will be working on Apple’s marketing team under global marketing chief Phil Schiller. [Source: Forbes]
Amazon has submitted plans for a new headquarters in Seattle. The building is reportedly a mixture of a skyscraper, tri-sphere, and a bio-dome-like space. [Source: TechCrunch]
Runscope, a startup that offers tools to monitor API traffic and address the problems with broken APIs, announced today that it has $1.1 million in seed funding. Funding came from True Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz. [Source: TechCrunch]
Rumors have been circulating that Microsoft’s upcoming Internet Explorer 11 will support WebGL. The latest hint of this came from a Vine teaser that stated ”what’s next? WebGL?”. [Source: The Verge]
At the Future in Review conference today Collaborate.com launched its program today. The company aims to make an online mapping platform that goes above and beyond Google Earth. [Source: CNET]
LexisNexis has announced that it will be closing its Bellevue offices by the end of the year. According to GeekWire 80 jobs will be affected by this development. [Source: GeekWire]
Photo sharing app Piictu announced today that it is joining forces with betaworks company Kandu. While the Piictu app will be shutting down on May 31, the company claims the two will work to make new products in the future. [Source: TechCrunch]
A recent FCC filing has confirmed that the much-rumored Google X Phone will be coming to Sprint. The device will supposedly be available later this year. [Source: BGR]
Tipbit is a startup working to make “everyday business tasks faster and easier.” The company is backed by Ignition Partners and Andreessen Horowitz and according to an SEC filing has already raised $1.95 million in debt financing. [Source: GeekWire]
Twitter today unrolled a new feature for select advertisers called Lead Generation Card. This feature allows users to sign up for advertisers’ programs using expanded tweets. [Source: CNET]
Cardeas Pharma, a Seattle-based biotech startup led by Bruce Montgomery, has raised $34 million. Funding was led by H.I.G. BioVentures. [Source: GeekWire]
Swivl, an iPhone accessory designed for teleconferencing amongst friends, family, and in the classroom, has raised $500,000 from Grishin Robotics, the company has announced. The funding will be put towards the development of Swivl’s second-generation product; the company is said to have shipped over 100,000 of the original device.
[Source: Swivl]
Boost (a prepaid carrier owned and operated by Sprint) recently announced its Mobile Wallet, a tool that allows customers to build a “virtual bank” of sorts, and GigaOM reports that the wallet may soon be coming to Virgin Mobile (another prepaid carrier) and Sprint’s own network in the future.
[Source: GigaOM]
Google has updated its Chrome browser for Android, bringing fullscreen browsing, better search, and (on tablets) the ability to view tab history with a long press of the “back” button to the mobile operating system.
[Source: Google Play]
Foursquare has updated its iOS and Android apps with what it is calling “super-specific searches” meant to allow users to search for places based on their cost, proximity, whether or not they or their friends have checked in there before, and more.
[Source: Foursquare]
Pearson-owned Penguin has agreed to a $75 million settlement with the US Department of Justice over its — and other companies, including Apple — involvement with an alleged attempt at ebook price-fixing, Reuters reports.
[Source: Reuters]
Music labels continue to block Apple’s iRadio steaming product in the hope of getting a better deal, the Verge reports. The labels are said to be fighting the shift towards streaming music products and the impact that’s having on their CD sales and music downloads.
[Source: The Verge]
Mac and iOS development studio the Omni Group has launched its OmniPresence syncing service meant to keep files and documents in sync across devices. The tool is based on open Web technologies and is available in the OmniGraffle, OmniGraphSketcher, and OmniOutliner products.
[Source: MacStories]
Facebook Gifts, the e-commerce effort meant to reduce Facebook’s reliance on advertising, has introduced a new scheduling feature that will allow users to decide when gift recipients should be notified of their present, Inside Facebook reports.
[Source: Inside Facebook]
Samsung has purchased a 10 percent stake in Pantech, the third largest Korean handset maker, for $48 million (53 billion won). To offset any regulatory concerns, Samsung will a passive investor. [Source: TNW]
Google has added monthly Top Charts to its trends product to offer a visual representation of the things people are most interested in. Topics include actors, animals, Books, Cars, and TV shows among many others, with each including the ten most popular items within the category. [Source: Google]
OpenStack cloud company Cloudscaling has raised a $10 million Series B round from new investors Juniper Networks’ Junos Innovation Fund and Seagate, as well as early investor Trinity Ventures. The company’s customers, including Korea Telecom, turn to Cloudscaling to obtain an an on-premise private or public cloud comparable to Amazon Web Services. [Source: GigaOM]
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