Tech news from metro.us/boston

How in the world is Pinterest worth $1.5 billion?

REUTERS — Thu, 17 May 2012 09:23:58 -0400

Social networking site Pinterest has raised $100 million from a group of investors led by Japanese online retailing giant Rakuten Inc in a deal that reportedly values the three-year-old U.S. company at $1.5 billion.

Rakuten said it was joined in the capital-raising by existing shareholders Andreessen Horowitz, Bessemer Venture Partners, FirstMark Capital and a number of angel investors.

The new round of financing values Pinterest — one of Silicon Valley's fastest growing startups — at $1.5 billion, up sharply from $200 million late last year, Wall Street Journal said.

Valuations for tech startups have been rising dramatically, as illustrated by Facebook's $1 billion purchase of photo-sharing application Instagram last month.

Pinterest, an online scrapbook where users can "pin" images and follow others, has grown from less than one million users in May 2011 to about 20 million in April, according to comScore. It is the 16th most-visited site in the United States, according to Web information company Alexa.

The Palo Alto, California-based company, which was launched in the fall of 2009, is led by co-founder Ben Silberman.

The funding will help Pinterest expand into Japan and Rakuten's 17 other markets, Rakuten said.

"We see tremendous synergies between Pinterest's vision and Rakuten's model for e-commerce," Rakuten Chief Executive Hiroshi Mikitani said in a statement.

Apple readies iPhone with bigger screen: Sources

Reuters — Wed, 16 May 2012 12:59:47 -0400

Apple Inc plans to use a larger screen on the next-generation iPhone and has begun to place orders for the new displays from suppliers in South Korea and Japan, people familiar with the situation said on Wednesday.

The new iPhone screens will measure 4 inches from corner to corner, one source said. That would represent a roughly 30 percent increase in viewing area, assuming Apple keeps other dimensions proportional. Apple has used a 3.5-inch screen since introducing the iPhone in 2007.

Early production of the new screens has begun at three suppliers: Korea's LG Display Co Ltd, Sharp Corp and Japan Display Inc, a Japanese government-brokered merger combining the screen production of three companies.

It is likely all three of the screen suppliers will get production orders from Apple, which could begin as soon as June. That would allow the new iPhone to go into production as soon as August, if the company follows its own precedent in moving from orders for prototypes for key components to launch.

Apple's decision to equip the next iPhone with a larger screen represents part of a competitive response to Samsung Electronics Co Ltd.

Samsung unveiled its top-of-the line Galaxy smartphone with a 4.8-inch touch-screen and a faster processor earlier this month.

With consumers becoming more and more comfortable using smartphones for tasks they once performed on laptops, like watching video, other smartphone manufacturers have also moved toward bigger displays.

AESTHETICS AND DESIGN

A likely shakeup in the design of a larger-screen iPhone could go a long way in boosting its "wow" factor, convincing fans to trade in their old iPhones for new ones, said Shaw Wu, an analyst at Sterne Agee.

"Not only do users pay for features, but they also pay for aesthetics and design. That's as important, or more important, than features," Wu said. "People love the current design -- but it's 18 months old."

The latest iPhone 4S was introduced in October of last year and essentially has the same form factor as the iPhone 4, launched in 2010.

Samsung, which this year became the world's largest cell phone maker, sold 45 million smartphones in the first quarter, and sales of the Galaxy phones outstripped the iPhone.

Apple was not immediately available to comment.

Apple's move toward a larger display for the next generation iPhone was earlier reported by the Wall Street Journal.

In addition to being Apple's rival, Samsung is also a major components supplier to the U.S. computer, tablet and phone manufacturer.

The share of the production of new screens that go to each of the three manufacturers working with Apple has not been determined, one source said.

Sales of the touch-screen iPhone now account for about one-half of Apple's total sales, and the phone has been a key source of growth for the company in Asia.

A report in March by a South Korea business newspaper said Apple would use a "retina" display on the next iPhone, the same technology in its latest iPad that enhance image quality.

Sidescroller: A review of 'Mario Tennis Open' and 'Starhawk'

NEW YORK — Tue, 15 May 2012 17:04:31 -0400

Remember that mountain of gold Scrooge McDuck would swim through? That's about how expensive it is to make a top-tier video game these days. As a result, developers simply can't risk giving one console an exclusive to call its own.

Console manufacturers, though, can still flex that "we've got what the other one doesn't have" muscle. Here are reviews of two.

'Mario Tennis Open'
Console: 3DS
Company: Nintendo
Grade: 4/5
Nintendo is essentially the king of exclusive titles, and nobody speaks to that more than everyone's favorite Italian plumber. Mario, just like Joe, may be a plumber in name only. He spends most of his time saving princesses and playing sports. Now he's back on the tennis court, this time in 3-D!
"Mario Tennis Open" is pretty similar in layout to last year's "Mario Kart 7." There are tons of courts, characters and play styles. The online play, available in 1-on-1 and 2-on-2, retains the high watermark set by "MK7." The game tries too hard to shoehorn in touch-screen and gyroscope control, but it's still an addictive and fun game of cartoon tennis.

'Starhawk'
Console: PS3
Company: Sony
Grade: 4/5
If Nintendo is the king of exclusives, Sony is definitely an archduke. The company has the "Uncharted" series, "Resistance," "God of War" and too many more to list. Now they have "Starhawk," too.

This third-person action title has a pretty generic single player campaign. The writing is lazy and doesn't adequately capture the majesty of the space Western. Some of the set-pieces are cool, but a great many are forgettable. So why the high score? The multiplayer is seriously amazing. Like, "hold your pee in for 16 hours because you are so addicted" amazing. Thirty-two people in space battling it out on foot, in ships or however else they want. It's the craziest online experience to be had on the PS3.

Google’s self-driving car gets a license in Nevada

STAN SCHROEDER, MASHABLE — Tue, 08 May 2012 16:08:35 -0400

The state of Nevada has issued a first license for one of Google's self-driving cars -- provided there are two people inside the car at all times, The Associated Press reports.

Nevada's DMV has issued the license after conducting demonstrations that the car is safe for testing on public streets.

Google's self-driving cars use a laser radar on the roof of the vehicle to detect obstacles, pedestrians and other cars. With the help of GPS and a bit of artificial intelligence, the car can drive itself with very little or no intervention from the human sitting inside.

That said, Nevada's regulations require two people in the test cars: one in the driver's seat, and other monitoring a computer screen that shows the car's planned route as well as traffic lights and other potential hazards on the road.

As soon as the "driver" touches the brake or the wheel, he takes control of the vehicle.

We had a chance to test out one of Google's self-driving cars in March 2011, and the results were good: no glitches, no unwanted close encounters with walls or other obstacles.

However, in August 2011 one of Google's cars caused an accident on the road.

The lesson of Sarah Phillips is clear: Everyone needs to change their Twitter picture to a hot girl

NATE JONES — Wed, 02 May 2012 10:18:26 -0400

Yesterday, Deadspin broke the story of Sarah Phillips, a freelance sports-betting columnist who in her spare time, it seems, was casually scamming a multitude of bettors and meme-makers out of their hard-earned cash. Here's one sample interaction with a man named Matt, which has the air of a terrible pulp novel:

A few days later, Phillips asked Matt for his advice on a Cardinals-Brewers game. The over/under for the game was 7.5 runs. Matt told her to take the over. She said she was betting $3,000 on the game. She sent him the betting slip to prove it, and he thought this was way over the top. Well, he thought to himself, at least I'm not betting against her.

The final score of the game? 5-2. She lost her $3,000, and she was mad. She responded by sending him an invoice for $5,000 through Nilesh Prasad.

"She said I owed her that money in addition to thousands more for reasons unbeknownst to me," he told Deadspin. "She said if I didn't paypal it to her that night she would have the LAPD come to my apartment and rob me. I told her I don't carry cash, and kept a hunting knife by my bed for three weeks." (According to a screengrab of a Gchat conversation, she told him the LAPD would "cordially come by" his apartment to take the money).

In another instance, Phillips and Prasad allegedly manipulated the college student behind the NBA Memes Facebook page into letting him give them control of the account, after which they removed him as an administrator and began using the page to redirect traffic to their own Sports Comedy Network.

How was Phillips able to swindle so easily? Well, having the ESPN name attached to your Twitter bio doesn't hurt. But you can't deny the impact of Phillips' Twitter image — a young, attractive college student — on getting guys to want to keep talking to her. (We should note here though that life as an attractive woman comes with its own set of problems, and guys who complain that hot girls get everything handed to them on a plate usually have some sort of issues.)

To test out how easy it was to accumulate a following on Twitter, NBA writer Myles Brown tried an experiment, switching his Twitter avatar to the same one Phillips used:

Funny story: Ever since she was exposed as a fraud, Sarah Phillips gained 2,000 followers.
— Myles Brown (@mdotbrown) May 2, 2012

I've gained about 100 since I took her avi. Men are still stupid. News at 11.
— Myles Brown (@mdotbrown) May 2, 2012

Which got us thinking: Could other Tweeters improve their online following by making a similar move? Check out these edited Tweets and tell us, would you be more likely to follow them?

(All images taken, like Phillip's early headshots, from Hot Chicks With Douchebags.)

Sidescroller: The sound of gaming

NEW YORK — Tue, 01 May 2012 15:42:47 -0400

Everywhere you go, it's "graphics this" and "graphics that." All of this anti-ear propaganda has got to stop! Without audio, collecting coins and stomping on Goombas would be a sad, loveless affair. Certain peripheral manufacturers understand this and are doing their best to make modern games sound as good as they look. Here are a few recent attempts at aural greatness.

A30 Wireless Headset and Mixamp
Company: ASTRO Gaming
Grade: 4/5
So, you actually respect your neighbors? Then you may not want to blast "Call of Duty" at 4 a.m. Use the A30 Wireless Headset and Mixamp instead. Astro Gaming's little beauty lets you fully customize what you hear while you frag the heck out of some random 13-year-olds. Want to focus on their incessant whining? The A30 lets you do that. It's all wireless, so you can lay on the couch with nothing to hold you back from utter and complete lethargy. Yes!

Nyko Vita Speaker Stand
Company: PS Vita
Company: Nyko
Price: $30
Grade: 4/5
If you spent your teen years blowing out your eardrums at punk shows, then portable systems just might not seem loud enough to you. This goes double when using portables to watch Netflix or use Skype. Enter Nyko and its Vita compatible speaker stand. It works like a charm, using a simple cradle, and the price is certainly right. It also doubles as a charger. Finally, you'll be able to understand all of Nathan Drake's snappy one-liners.

Try this

Orb Audio Booster
Company: Orb Audio
Console: PC/TV/All consoles
Grade: 4/5
The main problem with being an audiophile in a big city is space. Who has the room for all of that square footage? Speakers and amps are huge, and we live in exposed-brick coffins. Orb Audio has been chipping away at this problem for years, and its newest creation is the Orb Audio Booster system. This speaker/amp combo sounds nearly as good as a high-end solution but clocks in at about the size of two tennis balls and a small book.

New job site thinks like a matchmaker

SARAH KESSLER, MASHABLE — Sun, 29 Apr 2012 16:29:41 -0400

When it comes to deciding where to work, you don't want LinkedIn -- you want eHarmony.

At least that's the idea behind Path.to, a job matchmaking start-up launching on Tuesday.

The new website asks job candidates to fill out a survey about their job preferences including location, salary, benefits and work environment. Other users can vouch for their skills, and endorsements are weighted depending on the reputation of those who give them.

To further verify their interests and expertise, candidates connect their profiles to social networks, such as Twitter and Facebook, and to professional communities, such as Behance, Dribbble, Forrst and Github.

Path.to uses all of this information to create a compatibility rating for each job it recommends. When candidates apply, employers can easily rank them by the same score. Both parties can indicate which results they like and dislike in order to improve future results.

For now, Path.to only lists tech jobs in San Francisco's Bay Area. The start-up has signed up about 120 hiring companies to pay per job listing. It has also accepted a $1.5 million investment from staffing firm Adecco and plans to incorporate a product for third-party staffing firms at some point.

But a recent review of dating sites that use algorithms to match potential couples found their claims of predicting true love don't pan out. Can an algorithmic matchmaking process work any better when it comes to jobs? "What eHarmony is looking for is a deeper, emotional understanding of a person for a broader set of reasons," Path.to founder Darren Bounds says. "Ours is for a more specific purpose."

How big of a jerk are you on Twitter? Let Klouchebag tell you!

NATE JONES — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 14:56:20 -0400

Twitter is fun for a lot of things, but what it might be most fun for is being a jerk. Give someone 140 characters to say what they think, and even the most mild-mannered of us will turn into a raging snarkminstrel, sarcastically @-replying celebrities and ironically retweeting our foes. It's all basically harmless — like summer camp, everyone knows the things you do on Twitter don't matter in real life.

But still, it's fun to wonder, exactly how much of a jerk are you being on Twitter?

Luckily, the new social media gizmo Klouchebag (the name is a portmanteau of Klout and ... well, you get the picture) exists, for the sole purpose of telling us exactly how bad of people our tweets make us seem.

Klouchebag analyzes our tweets in four categories: Anger (how much you rant), Retweet abuse (how much you clog up your followers' feed with bizarre tweets from people they don't follow), Social Apps (how many of your tweets are mindless 4square and Instagram updates) and English Misuse (s3lf-expl4n4t0ry). All they need is a category for shameless self-promotion, and Klouchebag is all set!

Here are our results. (We blame that time we retweeted our friend's live-tweet viewing of "Atlas Shrugged.") What are yours?

Study: Macs and malware

TODD WASSERMAN FOR MASHABLE, NEW YORK — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 18:13:16 -0400

In a challenge to the prevailing belief that Apple computers are immune to the sort of cyberattacks that plague Windows-based machines, research firm Sophos has released a study claiming that 1 in 5 Macs has malware.

The report, released on Tuesday, is based on a "100,000-strong snapshot" of the millions of Macs that downloaded Sophos's free Mac antivirus software. The study found that 20 percent of Macs were carrying one or more instances of Windows malware.

Such malware doesn't cause symptoms unless the Mac owners run Windows on their machines, but it can be spread to others.

However, this doesn't appear to be solely a Windows-based problem. The report also found that 2.7 percent of Macs were infected with Mac OS malware. The majority of such Mac OS malware is composed of fake antivirus attacks, like the recent Flashback botnet. Mac owners can contract such malware by downloading e-mail attachments, visiting rogue websites and unknowingly installing it via their USB drive.

To avoid downloading such malware, Sophos recommends running an antivirus program and keeping it up to date, exercising caution about which links you click on, keeping software patches current and keeping an eye out for e-mail-based scams.

Is the digital world killing creativity?

Sure, you can use that smartphone to create an emotionally stirring Instagram of the waffles you had for brunch in mere seconds. But that same device can also serve as a ball and chain for the working world: e-mails constantly arrive, even during off hours; LinkedIn requests buzz after networking events; and has that important new contact followed you on Twitter yet?

While our current age of digital disruption has opened a cornucopia of new casual creative endeavors, the networked generation's ability to multitask -- and the constant need for instantaneous action -- may also be hindering creativity.

Consider this: In a recent global study, three-quarters of respondents said their creative potential is being stifled. More than 60 percent of Americans said their education systems squelch creativity, and a majority of total respondents said pressure at work hurts creativity. Yet 80 percent of respondents worldwide said allowing creativity to flourish is critical to economic growth.

Those numbers come from a recent survey of 5,000 adults in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, France and Japan. The study was commissioned by software giant Adobe, and its results were announced Monday.

Given that Adobe just released the latest version of its wildly popular Creative Suite line of products including Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign, it's no surprise the company would play up the need for a more hospitable climate for experimentation. But the study's findings do indicate that people worldwide feel unfulfilled creatively.
Sam Laird for Mashable

Sidescroller: 'The Witcher 2' just like 'Game of Thrones'

NEW YORK — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 18:25:49 -0400

'The Witcher 2: Enhanced Edition'
Console: Xbox 360
Company: Warner Bros. Interactive
Grade: 4/5

The "Witcher" series is an unlikely console success story. The franchise was developed for the PC by a small Polish company. The first one moved some units. The second one was a bona-fide phenomenon. Now Xbox 360 players can stop watching "Game of Thrones" for a while to actually, um, sort of play it. As long as you don't have to leave your couch, right?

Just like the HBO show and stocky book series, this game has backstabbing and political intrigue in spades. You play as a monster-hunter dropped in the middle of a kingdom-wide conflict. There is sex and violence galore, so don't let your rambunctious teen trick you into buying this to make up for years of parental neglect.

There's also a fantastic, open world to explore filled with genre-defying characters. The elves in this game are tree-dwelling murderers and the dwarves are lazy fornicators. It's like Tolkien if his entire worldview was predicated on methamphetamines and finding his wife with another man.

And the gameplay? It's a blast. This game has the most satisfying fighting mechanics in recent memory. There's an easily accessible menu that lets you dole out lethal magic on the fly and the melee combat just feels right. Preparation and smarts are rewarded here. If you go in expecting to just mash buttons, you'll get your medieval butt handed to you.

The graphics are stunning and in some cases even better than its closest competitor, "Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim." You'll run into some frame rate hiccups every now and again, but its nothing that'll ruin the experience. It is, after all, running on a console that is nearly 7 years old. Ah, Father Time, you miserable bastard.

Metro does not endorse the opinions of the author, or any opinions expressed on its pages.