Family Learning Center

Posts Tagged ‘Led’

Hunch Takes $12 Million From Khosla Ventures, Adds Former Facebook CFO To Board Of Directors

Recommendation engine Hunch confirms that they’ve raised a new round of financing – $12 million – led by Khosla Ventures. Partner Gideon Yu, who joined Khosla Ventures last year, was previously the CFO of Facebook. He is now joining Hunch’s board of directors as part of the deal. Hunch was valued at $52 million in the round.

I spoke to cofounder Caterina Fake this evening about the round. Fake says that Hunch, which is less than a year old, now has lots of data to work with in making recommendations. In fact, she says, users have answered nearly 50 million questions on Hunch since launch, and the company can use that data to make better and better recommendations.

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales joined the company’s board of directors in late 2009.

Read the whole story…

Benchmark, Others Store $9 Million In Scale Computing

Benchmark Capital is placing a rather hefty bet on Indiana-based SAN startup Scale Computing – they’ve led a $9 million Series B round of financing and Partner Bill Gurley joins the company’s board of directors.

Existing investors Blue Chip Venture Company, CID Equity and Spring Mill Venture Partners also participated in the round.

Scale Computing sells storage hardware – actual machines with a proprietary software layer – to mostly small and medium sized businesses. The low end product is 3 Terabytes of usable storage for around $10,000, and additional storage can be purchased and added to the cluster from there. The company, which competes with HP’s Left Hand Storage, Dell’s EqualLogic and others, now has over 100 customers, says Gurley, and is growing fast.

Read the whole story…

Top Ten Ways To Fix Google Buzz

Google Buzz was pushed out the door too early and force-fed to users by placing it in Gmail. The launch has been marked by both privacy and usability issues. But the team at Google behind it, led by Bradley Horowitz, is working hard to fix problems and respond to user feedback. In fact, earlier today, Horowitz pointed people via Buzz and Twitter to an official Google product idea site for making suggestions to improve Google Buzz. The site is powered by Google Moderator, which lets people suggest ideas and then vote them up or down.

Below are the top ten ideas and feature requests on the site right now, which already has 13,607 votes on 338 ideas from 692 people. They range from making comments more manageable to fixing Twitter update imports so that they are more realtime to better filters and a ReBuzz button.

1. “Collapsible comments.”
2. “Allow me to “star” or “favorite” a buzz to read later just like Gmail, Google Reader, Google Groups and Twitter.”
3. “Fix the Twitter feed so they update in realtime instead of hours later in giant batches.”
4. “A “ReBuzz” button that forwards someone else’s buzz (including links, photo’s, etc. but not reactions) to your followers with a @reference to the original poster.”
5. “Move “Mute this post” from the menu to the Buzz item itself (e.g.: next to ‘Like’ etc.).”
6. “Buzz filter. Some people may not be interested in posts coming from certain sources (e.g. Twitter). It would be nice to have a simple way of filtering those out.”
7. “Labels. Or any other way to group either people or buzzes (or both?) into categories. The ability to group information or people according to topics or personal preferences, etc.”
8. “Allow multiple links in one buzz and let me add photos after adding a link. Currently only allows one link, and must add all photos before the link, or the photos option disappears.”
9. “View the stream chronologically, without bumping buzzes back to the top every time a comment is added.”
10. “More options for sharing posts from Buzz to other places”

Hmm, sounds like people want it to be even more like FriendFeed. What’s your top feature request for Buzz?

Read the whole story…

The apocalyPS3 ends in global resurrection, ARM chip at fault

The early belief that the PSN was spreading a brickitis infection to PS3s around the world has turned out to be not quite accurate. Yes, PSN was inaccessible over that extremely stressful day (for PS3 owners, the rest of us have been quite fine, thank you), but we’re hearing from Eurogamer that the villain in this story was an ARM chip inside the console — the very same one, in fact, that led to a few Zunes losing their minds back in 2008. The big problem here was simply a bit of hardware that couldn’t get its bearings straight after expecting 2010 to be a leap year, and the arrival of March 1 “fixed” everything for all eight affected PS3 SKUs (of a total of eleven). That leaves Sony with four years to make sure this problem isn’t heard from again, and if it doesn’t, we’ll be placing blame for the real 2012 apocalypse firmly on Howard Stringer’s shoulders.

The apocalyPS3 ends in global resurrection, ARM chip at fault originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 03 Mar 2010 04:17:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink Joystiq  |  Eurogamer  | Email this | Comments
Read the whole story…

Twitter-enabled LED table lets you get your Lite-Brite on from afar

Twitter-enabled LED table lets you get your Lite-Brite on from afar originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 27 Feb 2010 05:46:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink SlashGear  |  Macetech, USTREAM feed  | Email this | Comments
Read the whole story…

Finalized Pandora handhelds start shipping, proves that dreams really do come true

It’s been over two solid years since we first caught wind of this here gaming handheld, and while we were initially led to believe that finalized units would be in the hands of emulation junkies long before now, we suppose loyalists are finding that late really is superior to never. After months and months of “almosts,” the first wave of final Pandora handhelds are shipping out, with many community followers posting up unboxing shots as they come. We’re also expecting a flood of homebrewed applications to start surfacing as more of these filter out, so be sure and drop us a line if you discover and / or create something otherworldly. Plenty more shots in the links below — you know, if you’re still patiently awaiting the arrival of your own.

[Thanks, Paul]

Finalized Pandora handhelds start shipping, proves that dreams really do come true originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 12 Feb 2010 00:14:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |  GP32x, openXile  | Email this | Comments
Read the whole story…

No-name Mini USB pico projector now the cheapest you can buy

No-name Mini USB pico projector now the cheapest you can buy originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 10 Feb 2010 22:03:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink PicoProjector-Info  |  Amazon  | Email this | Comments
Read the whole story…

Hidden Backdoors On Torrent Sites Led To The Latest Twitter Attack

Early this morning, Twitter began alerting certain users to reset their passwords because of a possible phishing attack. They later elaborated on it a bit but it still wasn’t clear exactly what was going on. Now they’ve felt the need to fully go into exactly what went down — and it’s fairly interesting.

On their Twitter Status blog (interesting that it’s not the main Twitter blog), Del Harvey, Twitter’s Director of “Trust and Safety” has a post detailing the attack. Apparently, Twitter figured out that some torrent sites have been being created for a number of years by some individual who then sells them to others looking to get into the business. The problem is that this person seems to have included a backdoor into these sites so that they could access them later when the site became popular. And because people often use the same login and password across the web, a bunch of Twitter accounts were then comprimised with this data.

To make matters worse, it seems that there were also other exploits on these sites that allowed other hackers to gain access to data. Harvey doesn’t name any of the torrent sites involved (and says they likely won’t even be able to figure out all of them), but notes that if you’re a torrent site user, you should probably change your Twitter password immediately.

Harvey titles his post, “reason 4,132 for changing your password” — but really it should be, “reason 4,132 for not using the same login/password on all sites.” Here’s the main nugget:

The takeaway from this is that people are continuing to use the same email address and password (or a variant) on multiple sites.  Through our discussions with affected users, we’ve discovered a high correlation between folks who have used third party forums and download sites and folks who were on our list of possibly affected accounts.

[photo: flickr/Daquella manera]

Read the whole story…