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Posts Tagged ‘Contenders’

ActiveTrak: A Hybrid Service To Track Stolen or Lost Laptops

Portland has a fast emerging tech culture that is seeing a number of new technology startups.

Today, $225,000 is on the table for one of the year’s biggest events: The Oregon Entrepreneur Network’s annual Angel Oregon.

One of the major contenders is ActiveTrak, which tracks lost or stolen devices. The company is launching a SaaS service in the next three months for the enterprise.

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You may know the company for its consumer service: GadgetTrak. The software is installed on laptops or mobile devices. It uses WiFi to track the device. For mobile devices, the service may use GPS. If that’s not available, it will triangulate using WiFi hotspots or cell towers. The software will also take a picture of the person who stole it.

The software has been used to track stolen computers that has helped break up criminal rings. Recently, Portland schools had a number of laptops stolen that had the software installed.The software tracked the devices, leading to arrests and recovery of the laptops.

CEO Ken Westin said the enterprise service will be available as SaaS or on-premise offering. One of its pilot accounts is with a major chemical company.

People will install the software on the device, which syncs with the application in the cloud. Mobile devices will allow for over the air updates such as with iPhone or Android applications.

Security is obviously a priority. ActiveTrak will store its databases on dedicated servers. The application layer will reside in the cloud. The on-premise service will reside entirely As demand increases, it will increase or decrease its number of application servers as demand peaks and ebbs.

Westin said they are trying to avoid issues with propagating data across a number of servers. Data, in Westin’s view, is easier to secure in one place.

Discuss

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Week in review: Company-decimating soda bottles, Metaplace’s vanishing virtual worlds

Here’s our rundown of the week’s business and tech news. (Due to the holiday-shortened week, I’m including fewer posts than usual.) First, the most popular stories VentureBeat published in the last seven days:

Can a single bottle of soda decimate your company? Absolutely. — Entrepreneurship guru Steve Blank writes about how seemingly insignificant things, like the availability of free soda, reflect the big challenges startups face as they grow.

2010’s hottest contenders: 8 products to watch — Columnist Saad Fazil picks eight products that could make a big splash in 2010, from note-taking service Evernote to smartphone maker HTC. He also points out some of the big trends that will be shaping multiple industries.

Panasonic’s new home battery could store a week’s worth of electricity — Panasonic appears tobe charging into the green market, first with deals to supply batteries for electric and hybrid vehicles, and this week with the announcement of a massive lithium-ion storage battery that is supposedly capable of powering an average home for up to a week.

80legs sets its web crawler free — 80legs is a web-crawling service that promises to let smaller companies to build their own mini-Google. Now it’s making the service even more accessible to bootstrapped entrepreneurs, researchers, and others, by offering a free version.

And here are four more stories we thought were important, thought-provoking, or fun:

Metaplace to shut down its site for thousands of virtual worlds — Virtual world platform Metaplace announced that it needs to make “a strategic shift,” and will close its site on Jan. 1. When that happens, some 70,000 virtual worlds will disappear from the internet.

Why so few paid Android apps? Blame Google Checkout — Only 21 percent of the location-based Android mobile apps in Google’s Android Market app store have a price tag, according to a new report co-authored by mobile analytics firm Distimo. Vincent Hoogsteder, the firm’s chief executive, tells us why.

Google acquisitions may signal big push against Microsoft Office – Googlers have been talking about how 2010 will be a big year for improving their Google Docs word processor and turning it into a real competitor against Microsoft Word. Recent Google acquisitions (confirmed and otherwise) suggest some of those new features will come from startups.

Spotify biding time for the right contracts before U.S. debut — The most eagerly anticipated music service this side of the Atlantic Ocean didn’t cross the pond this year. What’s going on? We sat down with Spotify’s vice president of products to find out.

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Twitter Acquires Mixer Labs To Step Up Geo-Location

Twitter CEO Evan Williams just announced on the company blog that they have acquired Mixer Labs, creators of GeoAPI. In a nutshell, GeoAPI provides developers with the ability to query the world through services which include a reverse geocoder; deep data about 16 million businesses and tens of thousands of points of interest; a writable layer for developers to annotate the world and do complex geo-queries; and location-enabled media layers (e.g., Twitter and Flickr). Just recently, they added an iPhone SDK to speed up mobile development as well.

GeoAPI will be integrated directly into the Twitter API, speeding up Twitter’s efforts in the geo-location space. In August 2009, Twitter first announced that they’re getting into the geo-location game as well. And, in September, a lot of you started seeing the Geo API in action through apps like Tweetie, Birdfeed, etc.

Geo-location has been a hot topic these last few months with contenders including Foursquare, Gowalla (which recently took a hefty amount of funding in), Stalqer, Seesmic Web, and many more applications.

It’ll be interesting to see how companies like SimpleGeo will thrive in the space now, especially since a lot of SimpleGeo’s data is Twitter and social network based.

Mixer Labs actually started out as TownMe, a site that is a comprehensive guide to pretty much everything that’s relevant at the local level, from restaurant reviews to the best schools and hospitals in town.

It’s good to note that Mixer Labs are all ex-Google employees. CEO ELad Gil and Twitter’s Director of Platform Ryan Sarver were both on the Geo panel at our Real Time Crunchup in November.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

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Android Market hits 20,000 apps, over 60 percent free

Quantity rarely equals quality, of course, but it’s still fairly notable that the Android Market has now managed to top 20,000 apps just a little over a year after it opened its doors — Apple’s App Store had over 50,000 apps a year into its existence, for those keeping track. Even more interesting, however, is the distribution of free and paid apps in the Market. According to AndroLib, fully 62.2% of the apps available are completely free, compared to just 37.8% that are paid apps. That’s in stark contrast to the App Store, which now has over 100,000 individual apps, of which (by some recent counts) a hefty 77% are paid applications — although only 30% of total App Store downloads are for paid apps. What does it all mean? Well, that’s open for debate. But one thing’s for sure: the rest of the app store contenders are going to have to work some special pie chart magic to come out looking good in this battle.

Android Market hits 20,000 apps, over 60 percent free originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 15 Dec 2009 14:38:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Internet Explorer 9 to sport GPU acceleration and HTML5 support

Even if you don’t have a favored fighter in the browser wars, you have to admit Microsoft’s Internet Explorer has been looking mighty unfit over the last few years. Younger and fitter contenders like Mozilla’s Firefox and Google’s Chrome have arguably overtaken the old stalwart, and now Microsoft is making some much-needed noise about fighting back. The software giant has been giving developers and curious journalists a very early peek into its IE 9 progress at PDC, with its stated ambitions including faster Javascript (see table above), HTML5 support, and hardware acceleration for web content. By harnessing DirectX and your graphics processor, the new browser will offer improvements in text readability and video performance, as well as taking some of the load off the CPU. Development has only just got under way, mind you, so there’s still plenty of time to screw it all up. Or make it awesome.

Internet Explorer 9 to sport GPU acceleration and HTML5 support originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 20 Nov 2009 05:11:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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HTC Hero for Sprint hands-on and impressions

When we first caught wind of HTC’s Hero coming to Sprint, we were more than a little hopeful that the issues we experienced with the European version would be alleviated. If you’ll recall, we had a bit of a love-hate affair going on with the chinny, wine-drinking iteration of the Android-powered phone due to a seeming lack of horsepower required to push HTC’s totally amazing Sense UI. In the last few weeks, we’ve heard lots of chatter about the forthcoming Hero update and the wonders it would do for the speed of this phone… but unfortunately there’s no such luck in the US, CDMA version of this device.

So, the point here is we were planning on doing a whole new review to showcase the differences between the old and new version of the Hero, but there really aren’t any besides the obvious physical changes. Sprint has added some great new apps, like its visual voicemail, which works like a charm (oh by the way Coleen, you got that job — maybe you should give them your new number too), and Sprint Navigation, though it’s also muddied up the mix by including the yawn-maker NASCAR app. Of course, this phone provides a full-on 3G experience, unlike the European version (for obvious reasons), and Sprint’s network seems as snappy as ever — general web browsing was a noticeably more enjoyable experience, for instance.

Here is what we can say about the phone: the industrial design of this version versus the older model is a marked improvement, chucking that awkward chin shape for a proper bottom half, and rearranging the hard buttons so that you’re not constantly getting your hands cramped up. We also have to mention the trackball, which is the most comfortable we’ve ever used. While the performance is still not where we think it should be, the Hero is an awesome addition to Sprint’s growing line of serious contenders in the smartphone game. If that new update is all it’s supposed to be (and if Sprint is expedient in bringing it to market), many of our complaints should be quelled — and this will be the killer device we know it can be.

Gallery: HTC Hero for Sprint hands-on

Filed under: Cellphones

HTC Hero for Sprint hands-on and impressions originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 17 Sep 2009 00:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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