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 »
PopExpert Online Video Education Marketplace Raises $2M In Seed Funding From Learn Capital And Others
As edtech startups continue to challenge the current state of higher education, and various niche startups focus on educating people through digital means, yet another company is getting a boost when it comes to helping people learn. PopExpert , a learning marketplace that lets students connect with experts in one-on-one video chats, has just raised a $2 million seed round led by Learn Capital , with participation by Jeff Skoll, Ken Howery, Michael Chasen, and Expansion VC . The site’s premise is simple: users can sign in and search for what they want to learn. Right now there are experts in multiple fields across the spectrum of “life, work, and play,” including meditation, nutrition, relationships, productivity, career mentoring, language and music. Once you log in, you can search for something like “yoga” and see a list of experts, validated with credentials and tagged with a price per session. From there, just choose your expert, schedule the session, and get ready to learn Read more »
Indoor Mapping Startup Meridian Adds Notification Zones To Their Strategy
Indoor mapping software startup Meridian , continues to evolve their product strategy with a recent update to their offering . Called Zones , the company’s newest update to their indoor mapping platform — and indoor is the key word here — allows geo-fence style app push notifications to be scheduled, by drawing polygons on location maps. When customers with the accompanying app walk into one of those indoor areas represented by the polygon on the map…Bam! They get a push notification. To be sure, it’s a real marketing opportunity and a concept underserved by the current, mostly GPS-based location awareness model for mobile devices. Differentiators There are several geo-fencing platforms out there — PlaceCast , Digby Localpoint , Wifarer and ShopKick all come to mind — so what is the big deal here? Meridian’s VP of Marketing Jeff Hardison, believes there are several differences in the Meridian approach. First of all, this notification system will work even when the accompanying app is not open nor in active use — essentially working while the app is in background mode — without significant battery drain. Other geo-fence providers might be able to do this via GPS or cell tower triangulation, but not by WiFi sensing, which is how Meridian works Read more »
Angry Birds Maker Rovio Will Now Publish And Market Select Third-Party Games
Rovio Entertainment, maker of the popular line of “Angry Birds” games, announced today that its expanding its business to include third-party titles, which it will publish, distribute and market to consumers. The new program is being called “Rovio Stars,” and makes available the company’s expertise as well as its marketing teams to other publishers. The first title to be released under the new effort is “Icebreaker: A Viking Voyage,” by Nitrome Ltd. The Icebreaker game, which follows the adventures of a lone Viking, will be followed by medieval adventure and puzzle game “Tiny Thief,” made by 5 Ants. This is the first time Rovio has included third-party titles in its lineup, the company announced this morning via a blog post and press release. “We want to help the developers to give these games that last coat of polish, publish the games and find their audience,” said Rovio’s Director of Development Kalle Kaivola. “We’re focusing on a small, select number of games, and each Rovio Stars launch will be an event of its own.” That “last coat of polish” means Rovio will actually assist its partners in finalizing game production and with post-production, the company explains. Read more »
Zoobean Grabs $500K From Kapor Capital & Others For Its Handpicked Kids’ Books Subscription Service & Online Shop
A number of startups have been trying their hand at subscription-based children’s books services, or something like a “Netflix for kids’ books,” so to speak. Today, another entry called Zoobean joins the flock, with the debut of its own handpicked catalog which parents can either subscribe to, or choose to just shop online like a standard e-commerce website. The company was co-founded by Jordan Lloyd Bookey , Google’s head of K-12 Education Outreach, and her husband Felix Brandon Lloyd , who is a former Washington, D.C., Teacher of the Year. Like the founders of similar services in this space, including the recently launched Sproutkin and The Little Book Club , for example, Bookey and Lloyd are also parents. “About a year ago, when our daughter was born, we were looking for a book for our son that would help him understand what it would mean to be a big brother. And in this particular case – we’re a multi-racial family – we were looking for something that might have kids that more resembled our family,” explains Lloyd. That challenge proved harder than they thought. Read more »
Google Translate For Android Can Now Interpret 16 Additional Languages By Camera, Adds Phrasebook Support
One of the coolest features of the Google Translate for Android app is that you can just point your camera at a text, tap the word you want to translate and get a translation back. Starting today , this feature supports 16 additional languages. Those are Bulgarian, Catalan, Danish, Estonian, Finnish, Croatian, Hungarian, Indonesian, Icelandic, Lithuanian, Latvian, Norwegian, Romanian, Slovak, Slovenian and Swedish. That’s in addition to Czech, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Turkish, which the app already supported in its first release . Google uses optical character recognition and its machine translation tools to make all of this work. Read more »
Security Firm: “Syria Has Largely Disappeared From The Internet”
Page views served to #Syria via @ CloudFlare over a 15-minute period an hour ago: 6628. Page views served in the last 15 minutes: 3. — Matthew Prince (@eastdakota) May 07, 2013 War-torn Syria is reportedly experiencing massive Internet outages. Both Google’s transparency monitor and security firm Cloudflare are reporting near zero levels of traffic out of the area. This isn’t the first time the beleaguered nation has experienced Internet issues. Back in 2012, the Syrian government, in attempt to paralyze opposition rebels, cut the entire country off from the rest of the world . “Syria has largely disappeared from the Internet,” writes security firm, Umbrella, about the abrupt traffic stop today. Umbrella describes how such a cutoff is possible, “Routing on the Internet relies on the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) Read more »
Adobe Updates Edge Animate HTML Animation Tool With Motion Paths, Lets You Host Your Files On Adobe’s CDN
As part of its general update to Creative Cloud , Adobe today announced the latest version of Edge Animate , its timeline-based tool for creative HTML5 animations. While this is one of the minor updates on a day where the company launched new versions of Photoshop, Illustrator and virtually every single other one of its tools, Edge Animate is worth keeping an eye on, especially given that even though it’s still a newcomer in Adobe’s lineup, its focus on HTML5 makes it one of Adobe’s more cutting-edge tools as it switches its focus from Flash to web standards. In this new version, Edge Animate gets support for motion paths, for example, something Flash developers have long had access to. With this, developers can now use the tool to “animate elements along fully customizable, fine-grain motion paths for highly expressive movements,” as the company noted in today’s announcement. With this update, Adobe is also introducing template support in Edge Animate, so users can now save their custom templates for quicker access to their reusable assets. For developers who focus on mobile projects, this new version also adds support for left and right swipe events for mobile-focused projects. One of the coolest new features, however, isn’t even about how you create animations in Edge Animate. Adobe now allows you to host your Animate runtime files on its own content delivery network, which is powered by Akamai Read more »
Basico Gets $500K To Launch Luxury Apparel Basics E-Commerce Brand For Brazil
When it comes to quickly growing markets, it’s hard to beat Brazil, where an emerging middle class is driving strong demand for all kinds of products — particularly in the e-commerce sector. The latest startup primed to take advantage of this boom is Basico , which just raised $500,000 in seed funding led by Initial Capital , the Israeli/Brazilian VC fund headed up by investor (and frequent TechCrunch contributor) Roi Carthy , along with Brazilian angel investor Guilherme Soarez. Basico aims to essentially be Brazil’s answer to Everlane , by being the country’s first online-only premium basic apparel brand. The company, which has a full-time staff of seven, will use the new funding to gear up for its public launch slated for this summer, CEO Alexandre (Bio) Veiga tells me. Basico’s first line of products will include t-shirts, polos, tank tops, and underwear for both men and women. Basico’s apparel will be made in Peru, as that’s where high-end Pima cotton is grown, Veiga says, and t-shirts will cost the equivalent of $25, half the typical retail price for comparable Pima tees sold in Brazil Read more »
Ask A VC: Index Ventures’ Mike Volpi On What To Look For In A Board Member And More
In this week’s Ask A VC episode, we sat down with Index Ventures partner Mike Volpi . Volpi, who makes investments in both enterprise software and consumer internet companies, serves on a number of boards, including Path, Sonos, Lookout, Hortonworks, Soundcloud, Big Switch Networks, Zuora, Foodily, and Storsimple. We asked Volpi what his biggest challenge is as the board member of a startup, and what entrepreneurs should be looking for in a board member. He also had some interesting perspective on the latest buzz word du jour, big data, and where we’ll see the most innovation taking place in the enterprise data space. Tune in above for more! Read more »