The Zortrax Is A 3D Printer From The Polish Motherland

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Zortrax! Drukarko moja! Ty jesteś jak zdrowie. The Zortrax (yeah, really) M200 is a $1,899 3D printer made in Poland that will be shipped internationally by a team of crack Polish engineers and designers. It has a 7×8 inch build plate and can print objects of up to 488 cubic inches. It prints ABS and Nylon and has a specially treated plate so you don’t need to lay Kapton tape down before you build. The best thing? As the creators note, it comes in a “slick, aluminum” case “that just works.” “It really ties your office space together,” they write. Read more »

Kickfolio Becomes App.io, Raises $1 Million+ To Bring Mobile Apps To The Browser And, Now, The Facebook News Feed, Too

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Kickfolio , a company offering tools that allow iOS applications to run in the browser using HTML5 technology, is today announcing both a name change, just over $1 million in seed funding and Facebook integration. The startup will now go by “ App.io ” — a name that CEO Edward Dowling says better matches what the company is doing now and where it’s headed. The new round was led by Quest Venture Partners, with follow-on investment by 500 Startups and PALgenesis, and saw participation from a number of angels, including Ankur Pansari (formerly with Facebook), Maneesh Arora (Zynga, Google, MightyText) and others. Maarten ‘t Hooft, who previously worked on Android under Andy Rubin, has joined the board. As that board appointment indicates, App.io is preparing to support Android, in addition to other platforms, in the near future. The funding will also be used to increase headcount, says Dowling. Since the round’s close, the team has grown from the three co-founders (Dowling, Chris Nolet and Diesel Laws) to six Read more »

Apple’s Problem Isn’t Skeuomorphism, It’s Services

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So iOS 7, it seems , is going to do away with much of the skeuomorphic design that has crept into the operating system and its utilities. Jony Ive, rumor has it, has done away with all the textures and real-world analogs in iOS 7 and has switched to a flat design instead. Good for him, but if that’s all that is new in iOS 7, Apple has a real problem. It’s not the design of iOS, but rather the fact that its own service offerings like Siri, iCloud and iTunes aren’t all that great when compared to what its competitors in Mountain View (and may startups ) are working on. Phones, for all intents and purposes, are pretty much thin slabs of metal or plastic with a high-res screen on top. There are few ways a company can use design to really set itself apart Read more »

Fitocracy Users Come For The Gamification, But Stay For The Community

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It’s no surprise that fitness gamification network Fitocracy is thriving — the company recently announced that it had surpassed 1 million users and has signed deals with personalities like the Governator, Arnold Schwarzenegger . But the company recently received its latest honor as one of Time Inc’s 10 NYC Startups to Watch. We took the opportunity to speak to co-founders Brian Wang and Dick Talens about why gamification seems to be working in the fitness world. At first glance, gamification seems to make sense based on the fact that fitness goes with athletics, sports or “games,” if you will. But devices like the Nike FuelBand and its various counterparts have shown that users grow discouraged when they can’t maintain steady progress, as measured by the quantified activity. But Fitocracy uses gamification as a way to get users interested in and hooked on the app, which lets you track your fitness and receive props from friends and the community for advancing. According to the founders, users come for the gamification but stay for the community, which becomes the source of inspiration as opposed to getting encouragement from your own progress. Read more »

The First Six Months Developing For The Computer On My Face

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Editor’s note:  Jon Gottfried is a Developer Evangelist at Twilio, Co-Founder of the Hacker Union, and a StartupBus Conductor. Follow him on Twitter  @jonmarkgo . Being one of the first cyborgs in the world, I have been privy to a unique set of bizarre experiences that have led to some early observations and theories about the future of Google Glass and wearable technology. At Glass Foundry SF, among the likes of Twitter , Facebook , Tumblr, the New York Times and Hearst, was a rag-tag group of independent developers building Ice Breaker : myself, Song Zheng, and Rajiv Makhijani . When I pitched the idea of creating a Google Glass version of the dorm-room game Assassins, I thought it would be an interesting tongue-in-cheek jab at the Terminator-esque form of this new piece of technology. I could not have imagined it would turn into a six-month secret project slated to launch at one of the largest tech conferences of the year. Read more »

50M Matches Strong, Hot Mobile Dating App Tinder Is Ready To Go Global, And Move Beyond Flirting

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Digital dating is nothing to scoff at; it’s a big business, and it’s changed a lot of lives — mostly for the better. Yet, while dating has seen enormous progress during the Digital Era, there’s still a lot garbage out there, and the space is still mostly dominated by a handful of old names. A gaggle of dating sites and apps have appeared over the past five years, but few have had real staying power, and many have gone the way of the dinosaur. While it’s still too early to make any pronouncements, it’s looking more and more like Tinder could buck the trend. Created by Hatch Labs — an LA-based startup backed by IAC , the same Barry Diller-led digital media giant that owns Match.com and OKCupid — Tinder has grown like a weed since it launched in October. A crazy, dating weed. Read more »

Laptop Week Review: Samsung 700T Fly Or Die

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In lieu of a formal review, Matt Burns and I sat down to take a look at the Samsung 700T AKA ATIV Smart PC Pro 700T , a convertible tablet that has a small button on the keyboard that pops out the Windows 8 tablet that forms the brains of the machine. The device is a bit chintzy – more pressed metal and injected plastic than I like to see on a laptop – but at about $1,000 retail it’s an acceptable compromise for Win8 users who are looking for a nicer tablet. I gave this device a Fly simply because I like the idea – a laptop that turns into a tablet with much fuss – but Matt was unimpressed. A little treat for you: this thing was so hard to describe that I had to read the name off of my phone and I still mispronounced it. The laptop hit about 6 hours of battery life and a Geekbench score of about 4,000, on par with the i5 tablets we tested. Read more »

Laptop Week Review: The Toshiba Kirabook

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Features: Ships with Windows 8 64-bit 13.3-inch display running at 2560 x 1440 (221ppi) 256GB SSD 2GHz Intel Core i7-3537U Processor 8GB of RAM MSRP: Starts at $1,599, model reviewed costs $1,999 Pros: An incredibly high-res display for a Windows laptop 2 years of free premium support Respectable battery life Cons: No discrete graphics card Man, this thing is expensive Eye Candy Meets Horsepower Toshiba isn’t exactly known for churning out attractive, high-end notebooks, which is why the company’s new Kirabook is such an oddity. It’s a handsome little thing if you’re into very (and I mean very) understated designs, though I imagine at least a few people will think the Kirabook looks downright dull. The Kirabook is wedge-shaped like many of its other ultrabook brethren but it’s thankfully very light on branding (save for a small, chrome-esque Toshiba logo slapped on a corner of the Kirabook’s lid), and a finish that comes as a result of the magnesium alloy chassis is nice enough. Sadly, that magnesium frame doesn’t mean the Kirabook is immune to scratches, something I quickly learned after stowing the thing in a checked bag while flying to Austin. It’s got a respectable spate of ports for an ultraportable too: AC power aside, there are a total of three USB 3.0 ports plus an HDMI out, a headphone jack, and a full-size SD card reader. If anything, the real eye-catcher here is that sumptuous screen Read more »

Google Starts Using Computer Vision To Let You Search Your Google+ Photos

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Google almost completely revamped the Google+ photo experience last week, but somehow the company didn’t get around to announcing one of the coolest photo-related features in its repertoire yet: Google now uses computer vision and machine learning to let you search your own photos for things like sunsets, food and flowers. I also tried terms like “cars,” “beach” and “bikes” and Google consistently returned the right results. This search is built into Google+, but you can also use the regular Google search and use the query term [ my photos of xyz ] to find the right images. That’s a huge step forward for photo search in Google. As Google rightly notes, “searching for your photos can be challenging because the information you’re looking for is visual.” I know I’m anything but diligent about tagging my photos, so this new search feature actually allowed me to find random images I had uploaded to Picasa Web a long time ago. As Google’s Vic Gundotra noted when he announced the new features for Google+ Photos at I/O last week, Google wants to help its users manage their photos. “Organizing photos is often a hassle,” he said, but oddly enough, the company didn’t announce this search feature at I/O and instead waited a week before launching it. Read more »

Kim Dotcom Claims He Invented Two-Factor Authentication, Has A Patent To Prove It

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Oh, Kim Dotcom. You just never stop surprising us. Just hours after Twitter finally rolled out its long-awaited Two-Factor authentication feature to protect accounts, the Megaupload founder is claiming to have invented the entire mechanism… and he’s got a patent to prove it. “But they won’t even verify my Twitter account?!”, he says. The patent in question can be viewed here . Filed for in 1998 and published two years later, it lists a Kim Schmitz — Dotcom’s name before he changed it in 2005 — as the sole assignee. For the unfamiliar, two-factor authentication is a mechanism intended to make it more difficult for hackers to access accounts that aren’t their own. When a user attempts to log in to a service from an unrecognized computer, the service sends a one-time password to an alternative device (like, say, a cell phone) known to belong to that user. Read more »