It may still be some time before you can take Google's ambitious wearable [...]]]>

It may still be some time before you can take Google's ambitious wearable computing project for a spin, but there's certainly no shortage of head-mounted displays out there for those looking to blaze a trail of their own. You can now add Silicon Micro Display's new ST1080 glasses to that list, a full 1080p display that will handle both 2D and 3D content (in a variety of formats), and also allow you to see through the glasses for augmented reality applications (albeit with just 10 percent transparency). As with most such glasses, however, you won't get head-tracking capabilities, and you'll have a couple of tethers to contend with (HDMI for video and USB for power, including via an optional battery pack). Those not put off by those constraints or the whole visor look can place their order now for $799.

Silicon Micro Display rolls out $799 ST1080 wearable display originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 18 May 2012 03:27:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Two years ago, WhiteyBoard founders Saachi Cywinski, Sherwin Kim and Jason Wilk set out to [...]]]>

Two years ago, WhiteyBoard founders Saachi Cywinski, Sherwin Kim and Jason Wilk set out to re-think those clunky, inflexible whiteboards found in classrooms and offices around the country. They developed a portable, flexible alternative: An inexpensive, “instant” plastic board that weighs less than two pounds and adheres to any surface without screws.

The idea, and the fact that co-founder Jason Wilk was (at the time) hard at work on a Y Combinator backed startup, quickly attracted $500K in seed funding from serial entrepreneur and founder of popular European professional network Xing.com, Bill Liao. The startup used the funding not only to to continue developing their whiteboards, but to develop a new product, called WhiteyPaint, which they launched late last year.

Wilk tells us that WhiteyPaint has since found an eager audience, leading to the fortunate problem of demand quickly outpacing supply. Struggling to finance demand on a bootstrapped budget, the founders reached out to Dallas Mavericks owner, Shark Tank investor, and HDNet Co-founder Mark Cuban. Seeing a billion-dollar market dominated by a few bloated players, Wilk said, Cuban believed WhiteyBoard was onto something.

So, today, the startup is officially announcing that it has raised an undisclosed round of seed financing from the billionaire entrepreneur. Wilk tells us that WhiteyBoard has already sold to over 10K businesses, and smaller versions of the product are currently in stores at retailers like Urban Outfitters and ThinkGeek as well as at fulfillment centers around the world. (What’s more, its products are now made exclusively in the U.S. of A.)

Since last November, he says, sales for both its whiteboard and paint have quadrupled, and with the new funding from Cuban, the team is this week launching version 2 of its WhiteyBoard paint, which the founders say not only has better performance and more durability, but is “the best dry-erase product the world has ever seen.

That remains to be seen, but it certainly helps in the validation department to have Cuban on your side. For now, WhitePaint is for sale on the startup’s website here.

While Callaway has been helping you navigate the golf course for awhile, all [...]]]>

While Callaway has been helping you navigate the golf course for awhile, all its imagery has been abstract; that's not much help if it turns out a patch marked "rough" on one hole is really shorthand for "crocodile-infested swamp." To that end, Callaway is launching the upro mx+, an upgraded version of its GPS tracker that uses real overhead photography to give a more realistic impression of the green, as well as to hint whether or not there's any chance you'll get your ball back if you mess up. Along with the static images, there's video flyovers to get a feel for the land at a perspective closer to your own. The updated touchscreen device also touts yardage calculation and an upgraded uexplore service for checking out scores and golf courses. The mx+ will carry a $249 price tag when it hits shops on May 30th, though the true-to-life graphics will freely emphasize just how much you're over par.

Callaway upro mx+ will show you a real view of the golf course, won't give you a mulligan originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 18 May 2012 02:48:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

It's likely overkill for those interested only in some basic tablet modding, but [...]]]>

It's likely overkill for those interested only in some basic tablet modding, but the folks from Liquidware (no strangers to the DIY scene) have a new bit of kit that should please those looking to take on a more ambitious project. Dubbed simply Amber, the kit is described as "80 percent of the way to a tablet" -- you'll get a 1GHz ARM Cortex-A9 processor, a 7-inch capacitive display and a customized version of Android 2.3, but no pesky casing to get in the way of any other additions you see fit to add. That convenience comes at a bit of a cost, though. The Amber will set you back anywhere from $983 to $1,674 depending on the kit you choose. Head on past the break for a quick look at it on video.

Continue reading Liquidware debuts Amber, a customizable Android development tablet

Liquidware debuts Amber, a customizable Android development tablet originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 18 May 2012 02:07:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Hundreds of Facebook employees congregated at ‘Hacker Square’ at the company’s Menlo Park headquarters this [...]]]>

Hundreds of Facebook employees congregated at ‘Hacker Square’ at the company’s Menlo Park headquarters this evening ahead of the company’s insanely-hyped initial public offering. Now, some of the first photos are starting to trickle in. There was a standing ovation for chief executive Mark Zuckerberg, who gave a talk before several long-time engineers bounced in while wearing capes or bringing boomboxes.

Tonight Facebook is having its 31st Hackathon to celebrate the IPO. Hackathons are a company tradition. They’re a place where engineers and other non-technical employees get to stay out all night building concepts into real products that sometimes eventually get shipped. Some of the big products that have come out of earlier Hackathons include Facebook chat and an early version of Timeline.

The company got its employees together around a big yellow crane that’s in the center of their ‘Hacker Square.’ The crane came from their old Palo Alto headquarters where it was originally put in by Agilent Technologies (the company that spun out of Hewlett Packard, which is arguably, the company that made Silicon Valley more than 70 years ago).

Here are some of the photos that have come in so far! The best photos are actually from Facebook product designer Francis Luu. But because we are trying not to be super lame, like various slideshow-addicted blogs that shall not be named, here is the link to his photo album. If you are a Facebook employee and are not living in ungodly fear of having your RSUs, options, etc. revoked on this special day, feel free to send us more photos at tips@techcrunch.com. 

Here’s the crowd that gathered before Zuckerberg’s talk:

Here’s a photo that YouTube’s Hunter Walk posted of the standing ovation for Zuckerberg:

Here’s the set-up before the event started in a photo from Blake Ross, a director who was brought in through Facebook’s very first acquisition:

Here’s a mock-up of something that looks like it might come out of Facebook’s analog research lab. (The lab didn’t make it though. But they might, given the response!):

Here’s the commemorative T-shirt for the Hackathon:

More people hacking:

We reported last month that venture firm Kleiner Perkins has been working on closing its [...]]]>

We reported last month that venture firm Kleiner Perkins has been working on closing its next fund, and both cleantech focused partners Ray Lane and Bill Joy are not listed as heading up investments for the new fund. Kleiner confirms those moves in an announcement on Thursday along with the fact that Kleiner has now closed its $525 million fund 15.

Fortune’s Dan Primack first reported last month that Kleiner has been making a transition in the partnership structure, including transitioning these two to focus on current investments, instead of leading new investments. Kleiner partner Brook Byers is also not named as a general partner on this new fund.

Kleiner notes that it will still be investing in cleantech in the new fund, but also points out that a further emphasis on digital will be made in the fund, and highlights new hires with expertise in mobile, social and cloud, including Mike Abbott, Bing Gordon and Mary Meeker. While Kleiner continues to say that it will still invest in cleantech, it seems like the firm isn’t placing the same emphasis on it as before.

There’s been a lack of successful cleantech exits for Kleiner to date to be sure. In recent weeks Luca Technologies pulled its IPO plans, and Silver Spring Network’s IPO has yet to come through. Electric car maker Fisker Automotive has continued to struggle for various reasons. Only solar inverter company Enphase Energy managed to make it out in March.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
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• Tesla’s Model X could make the electric SUV a hit
• Green IT Q4: solar, subsidies and the outlook for EVs
• Flash analysis: lessons from Solyndra’s fall

The litany of exciting Maker Faire products continues with MaKey MaKey, a device [...]]]>

The litany of exciting Maker Faire products continues with MaKey MaKey, a device that turns anything capable of conducting electricity into a controller. Developed by MIT Media Lab students Jay Silver and Eric Rosenbaum, you simply run a bulldog clip from the board to an object and hold a connecting wire in your hand. Connecting over USB, it's entirely programming-free, but if you find your interest piqued, you can flip the board over to use the Arduino module baked into the hardware. It's already surpassed its original $25,000 Kickstarter goal and when the run begins, you'll be able to pick up everything you need for just $35 -- but if you can't wait that long, head on down to the Bay Area this weekend.

[Thanks, Ryan]

Continue reading MaKey, MaKey turns the whole world into a keyboard

MaKey, MaKey turns the whole world into a keyboard originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 18 May 2012 01:14:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Editor’s Note: Nir Eyal is the founder of two acquired startups and an advisor to [...]]]>

Editor’s Note: Nir Eyal is the founder of two acquired startups and an advisor to several Bay Area companies and incubators. Nir blogs about the intersection of psychology, technology, and business at NirAndFar.com. Follow him on Twitter @nireyal.

Tomorrow Facebook will sell shares in one of the biggest tech IPOs in history. New investors will gobble up the stock to get a piece of the global phenomenon famously started in Mark Zuckerberg’s dorm room in 2004. But while owning the stock will have quantifiable value when it trades on the open market, few buyers will be able to say truthfully that they understood the value of the company just a few years ago.

Ask yourself candidly, what did you think of Facebook the first time you landed on its homepage? Where you blown away? Could you see how it would fill a gaping need in the lives of nearly a billion people? If you’re honest with yourself, and you’re not Peter Thiel, your answer is probably, “No, not really.”

Don’t feel bad. Like many of the astoundingly successful web companies of the last decade, it was hard to appreciate the value of Facebook at first glance. But one person who “got Facebook” early on was Noah Kagan, who in October of 2005 joined the company as one of its first product managers. In 2006, Noah was the source for an analysis of Facebook written by Nisan Gabbay. The essay identified one of the most important reasons for the company’s ascent to Internet glory and offers a prescient description of opportunities still to come:

“The Facebook success story is most interesting to me because of how daily offline social behavior drove usage of the site. There are plenty of activities in our daily life that could benefit from a complementary online product … Facebook demonstrates you have a great Internet service if offline behaviors can drive nearly daily usage online.”

The analysis was spot on. Facebook succeeded because it built new online habits around frequent offline behaviors. Originally, Facebook was designed to replace the physical face books undergraduates received their first week of school. The printed collection of classmates’ names and photographs was an indispensable artifact of college life and was referenced for everything from study group formation to late-night hookups.

TheFacebook.com, as it was originally known, offered users a digital way to feel connected to others throughout the day and from anywhere they could access the web. The power of this universal human need for social acceptance and connection helps explain how the company grew well beyond college campuses and now touches one in eight people on the planet.

The Need To Feel

Ask a devoted Facebook user why they log-in to the site several times per day and they’ll describe features they love and provide examples of how they use the service. They’ll tell you it’s a great way to share photos or keep up with their friends.

But below the surface is the need for emotional gratification. Though we can all shift our emotional states ourselves, it’s not easy. Instead of going through the hard work of consciously changing the way we feel, we use ready-made solutions to do it for us.

Using products or services for emotional gratification is nothing new; some of the most valued things on earth are those that have the ability to transport us quickly from pain to pleasure. For example, we laud the ability of painters or musicians to “move us” with their art. We shower athletes with millions for their ability to transform the gloomy start of the workweek into the excitement of Monday Night Football. Facebook, and the companies like it, are the new tools we use to quickly elevate our moods. This “emotion arbitrage” is the differential in work between having to create our desired physiological state ourselves versus utilizing a product or service to help do it for us.

Facebook won’t be the last company to help us feel good fast. The next web phenom to fulfill our emotional needs will likely contain the following traits:

Cued By Frequent Feelings

The most successful consumer web companies cater to our most basic and powerful emotions. People may feel emotions differently, but we all feel the same spectrum in varying degrees. The most valuable services create internal triggers in the user, activating desire to use the site whenever experiencing a particular sensation. These cues prompt users to come back to the site unaided by external messages. The site becomes the default solution to satiate their emotional needs.

The key is how often we feel the emotional cue. In fact, the market potential for a new company is a function of the frequency of how often the emotion it addresses is felt. As Gabbay correctly noted in his 2006 article, early Facebook users felt the need to connect to the site on a daily basis. Likewise, companies that successfully address frequently experienced emotions stand to reap huge rewards.

Pain Relief

When we feel negative emotions we seek out experiences to bring us back to more positive mental states. Products that can alleviate powerful negative feelings – like fear, sadness, rejection, anxiousness, inferiority, and uncertainty – even temporarily, can be a major draw for consumers.

Odds are that if you’ve felt restless during your day, you’ve visited Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest or one of the other top 25 websites to lift you out of your funk. However, positive feelings fade over time, and when we find ourselves in a negative emotional state again, the cycle continues. The chemistry of the brain ensures this is so.

With Facebook, it’s often loneliness that cues a visit to the site. Twitter is cued when the user fears being out of the loop about what’s happening. Pinterest users feel the urge to capture and collect visual scraps of the web, worried they’ll lose the image lest they pin it.

Specific Solutions To Fuzzy Needs

You may be thinking that to claim websites are used to satiate unpleasant emotions is a stretch. Clearly, no one logs into Facebook after saying, “I’m seeking to be taken out of a state of loneliness. Let’s check my timeline!” Yet, it’s undeniable that the mind compels us to do everything we do as it endlessly searches for rewards and avoids pain.

So how does a consumer technology company communicate what their product is for, without actually stating what the product is for? Obviously, no one would have signed-up for Twitter with the tagline, “Twitter alleviates your anxiety of social rejection.” Instead, the company made the value of the service concrete with the tagline, “Find out what’s happening, right now, with the people and organizations you care about.”

Yet, in Twitter’s early days even this messaging was still too opaque. So Twitter had to be even more specific about the value of the service. As Josh Elman, an early product manager who led the Growth Team at Twitter, explained to me, “We had to more actively tell the story and came up with use cases around knowing what was happening. One great example is when Conan O’Brien tweeted he was going on tour and sold it out quickly. We told the story as, ‘if you are a fan of Conan O’Brian and were on Twitter the morning of Thursday, March 11, you may have seen the tweet announcing his tour and quickly bought tickets. If you weren’t checking Twitter then, you missed out.’” Same message delivered, but with a specific example to drive the point home.

Things To Come

With the imminent Facebook IPO, Instagram’s recent billion dollar sale, and unprecedented new sources of capital funding seed-stage investments, a new tide of entrepreneurs will answer the enticing call of opportunity and pursue their Silicon Valley dreams. Though almost all will fail, a tiny few will create products, which will touch the lives of not just millions, but billions of people. Those entrepreneurs will have a firm understanding of human behavior and their products will be grounded in fundamental emotional needs.

When you get a lot of smart and interested people together to make a [...]]]>

So what if you applied that brave new world of expert prediction markets, of crowdsourcing the future, to the Facebook IPO?

That’s what famed investor Chris Sacca wondered aloud on Twitter, and programmer James Proud endeavored to find out. And thus was born Facebookipodayclosingprice.com, Proud even buying the exact URL Sacca had idly requested Tuesday.

By end of day Thursday, it had garnered more than 1,400 predictions, mostly from the Valley’s top luminaries — entrepreneurs, investors, analysts and others who know a thing or two from IPOs. And it was getting up to 20 visitors every second.

Pollsters and prediction market experts will tell you you need more than a thousand inputs for a good aggregate result with a low margin of error. So what did this prediction market come up with? And could you — or Sacca — get very rich in one day by banking on the result?

In theory, yes. Facebook’s launch price Friday morning will be $38. This site is predicting, in aggregate, that the stock will hit $54 by close of market Friday, for a total valuation of $135.7 billion.

Buy enough shares, and that $16 difference would make for a tidy one-day profit.

Of course, prediction markets have never been tested in this kind of circumstance. IPOs are inherently nerve-wracking wild rides. The Twitterati have been known to be wrong before. We certainly won’t be opening our wallets on the basis of this prediction.

But we will be eager to check back in at the closing bell, 4pm ET Friday, to see how close the prediction market came. Join us then!

More About: chris sacca, Facebook, facebook ipo, prediction market, trending, Twitter

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