LG launches three L Series II devices, Optimus L7II to be released first

Ahead of the Mobile World Congress that begins later this month, LG Electronics has announced the launch of its new Optimus L SeriesII smartphones. The company is launching three smartphones in this series: the dual-SIM variant L7II, the L3II and the L5II.
The L7II is the first device that will be launched. This has 4.3-inch touch screen, along with a 1GHz Dual-Core processor. It comes with 4GB space and 768 MB RAM and a space for micro-SD slot. The camera is 8.0 megapixel with LED Flash for the rear one and the front camera is VGA. The device runs Android 4.1 aka Jelly Bean.

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DISH’s Hopper With Sling Whole-Home DVR Now Available Nationwide, Following CES 2013 Awards Controversy

DISH today formally announced the nationwide launch of its Hopper with Sling DVR device, which allows users to record their favorite shows for later viewing, skip ads and also download DVR’d content to their iPad for offline viewing. The Hopper, which incorporates technology from partner Sling Media, Inc., was recently at the center of a controversy around the 2013 CES “Best of Show” Awards.

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After Growing Revenue 270% Last Year, Personalization Startup Sailthru Raises $19M From Benchmark, Adds Bill Gurley To Board

 Personalization startup Sailthru has been growing rapidly, with revenues increasing 270 percent over the last year. With that in mind, the company has raised $19 million in new Series B financing led by Benchmark. Along with the funding, the company is adding Benchmark general partner Bill Gurley to its board of directors.
The new funding round brings total financing to a total of $29 million, which included a $9 million Series A round raised in 2011 and a $1 million seed round in 2010. Other investors include RRE, DFJ Gotham, and AOL Ventures.

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A Huge Month: Online Education Is Replacing Physical Colleges At A Crazy Fast Pace

Educators knew the online revolution would eventually envelop the physical classroom, but a torrent of near-revolutionary developments in the past month are proving that change is coming quicker than anyone imagined. In just 30 days, the largest school system in the U.S. began offering credit for online courses, a major university began awarding degrees without any class time required, and scores of public universities are moving their courses online. The point at which online higher education becomes mainstream is no longer in some fuzzy hypothetical future; the next president’s Secretary of Education will need an entire department dedicated to the massive transition.

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Swrve Launches Targeted In-App Messaging To Get Games Players Reaching For Their Wallets

Dublin and San Francisco-based Swrve, which offers an in-app direct marketing platform aimed at mobile games developers or anybody making or responsible for marketing an app, has launched SwrveTalk to enable in-app marketing messages to be sent to users on a targeted and measurable basis. It can be employed to do things like cross-promote other titles in a portfolio or to improve conversion of time-limited in-app purchase offers, and so on.

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Boost For Israeli Startup Scene As Magma Venture Partners Fuels Up With $100M+ Third Fund — Taking Total Fund Size To $300M+

Israeli early stage high tech startup VC fund Magma Venture Partners, whose current portfolio includes online video-editing software developer Magisto, mobile analytics company Onavo, and navigation app maker Waze to name three, has completed fundraising on its third fund — Magma III — exceeding its target of $100 million (it did not specify by exactly how much).
Magma said it manages more than $300 million to-date. Its investments typically focus on digital media, SaaS and fabless semiconductors.  The fund is managed by partners  Yahal Zilka and Modi Rosen.

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Iterations: SnapChat’s Success Challenges Many Silicon Valley Assumptions

Yesterday, it was confirmed — SnapChat raised a big round of funding. By now, everyone also knows that SnapChat is a new communication medium, a phenomena reflecting a desire for ephemerality, and the fastest-growing consumer app out there today. As I was drafting this post last night, Saturday Night Live’s Seth Meyers mentioned the service during the shows “Weekend Update” news segment.

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Fly Or Die: BlackBerry Z10

The BlackBerry Z10 running the new BB10 operating system is a pivotal phone for the company formerly known as RIM. It’s BlackBerry’s flagship all-touch device, and while it has fine specs and cool features, the phone may not be enough to save the beleaguered Waterloo-based company.
To be clear, the BlackBerry Z10 is not a bad phone by any means. According to various sources, the phone’s launches in the UK and Canada were quite successful.
It has respectable specs, including a 1280X768 4.2-inch display, an 8-megapixel camera, NFC, LTE, and plenty of storage, and that doesn’t include all of the nifty features built into BB10.

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Nokia’s Cheapest Windows Phone 8 Lumia, The 620, Gives The Budget Android Pack A Run For Its Money

 The Nokia Lumia 620 is not a flagship smartphone — for high-end Windows Phone hardware, look to the Lumia 920 (or Samsung Ativ S). But what makes the 620 interesting is its (low) price: this is an entry-level handset that puts a polished mobile computing experience in your pocket without breaking the bank or compromising usability with dire, underpowered hardware.

When Nokia unveiled the 620 back in December it talked about wanting to add something more compact to its lineup. And the phone is certainly pocket-friendly. But the size of the 620′s price-tag is the real focus here: the Lumia 620 is Nokia’s cheapest Windows Phone 8 device by far (the Lumia 510 is cheaper still but that handset runs WP7.5/7.8, not WP8). Nokia’s target markets for the 620 are currently Asia-Pac, the Middle East and Africa, Europe and Canada. The company won’t comment on whether it will be bringing the handset to the U.S. in the future.

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Careless Whisper

When the Nintendo came out in 1985, there was something of a misconception of what, exactly, it was. For a generation that grew up without computers, much less video games, the NES must have seemed just like the latest toy – a high-tech plaything that, like other toys or the likes of arcade and pinball games, kids would engage with for a short time and then put away.
It wasn’t, of course; The Nintendo was among the first of the new generation of consoles, and games like Dragon Warrior, Super Mario Bros 3, and of course Final Fantasy ended up devouring not just hours, but dozens of hours, entire afternoons and weekends.
Naturally, there was a backlash among the parents. Did anyone else’s parents threaten to unplug their Nintendo or show it the window? And who can blame them? I can just barely imagine now their confusion (more so in another way, which I will get to) over how exactly this new toy was able to command so much of their kids’ valuable time. At the time, that confusion manifested in frustration and rejection, disgust even.

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Sign Up Now For Hardware Alley At TechCrunch Disrupt

Every Disrupt we run an amazing thing called Hardware Alley. For one day, Startup Alley becomes a haven for amazing hardware start-ups. We want you to join us.

The goal has always been to show off amazing hardware that we have written about over the past few months as well as a few surprises. Last Disrupt we featured the guys from Thermovape, Makerbot, and Lit Motors. This year we want to fill Disrupt NYC with more amazing companies.

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YCombinator-Backed Cube Goes Deeper Than Your Standard iPad Register

With innovations like Square’s iPad register, small businesses and retailers face a slew of options for how to manage in-store sales without having to pay thousand of dollars for older point-of-sale terminals.

But many of these newer offerings don’t do the tracking that many small retailers need after the transaction happens.

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Edit Away, No Sign-In Needed With Microsoft SkyDrive And Office Web Apps

A new feature from Microsoft allows people to share and edit documents from SkyDrive in Office Web Apps without the recipient having to sign in to their Microsoft account.

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TPB AFK, The Pirate Bay Documentary, Is Available Now On YouTube

The Pirate Bay Away From Keyboard is now available for viewing on YouTube. The entire one and a half-hour movie just premiered in Europe and is also available for download on the Pirate Bay.

 


You can also buy a copy here.

 

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AOL Q4 2012 Beats The Street On Sales Of $600M, Showing Its First Revenue Growth In 8 Years

AOL (owner of TechCrunch) has just reported earnings for Q4 2012 of $599.5 million on earnings of 41 cents per share. That matches analysts expectations on EPS but beats on revenues of $573.1 million. The figures show that after years of decline, the company continues to get back on track with revenue growth.


 Within that, advertising — the largest portion of AOL’s revenue — grew by 13% to $410.6 million. Within that, display, at $169.8 million, was essentially flat on a year ago, while search ads — which it offers in partnership with Google — were up by 17% to $103.6 million. Ad revenues from third-party networks — AOL works with sites like parenting.com to provide advertising alongside their content — brought in revenues of $137.2 million — a rise of 31%.

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Google Brings Hangouts In Gmail To India

Just before launching its latest general update to Google Hangouts, Google also recently announced that it is bringing its new group video chat tool to India. Just like in other countries, Google is replacing its current plugin-based Gmail video chat system with Hangouts in India, allowing its users there to chat with up to 9 people at a time (or just have a 1:1 chat like before).

With today’s larger update, Google introduced a bandwidth slider that allows users to switch of to adjust how much bandwidth they are using for Hangout – something especially important in countries where high-speed connections aren’t all that prevalent. Google also made an audio-only made available with this update (other participants will just see your avatar) and the service already offered an ultra-low bandwidth mode since last year.

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Super Bowl Ad-Related Hashtags Were Used 300K Times On Sunday, Up 273 Percent

Going into the Super Bowl, folks who care about such things probably knew it was not only going to be the Most Social! Super Bowl! Ever!, but also a big win for Twitter on the ad side. Now the company has published a blog post quantifying some of the ad-related activity that it saw.

Twitter says that of the 52 national ads that ran during the game, 50 percent included hashtags (to give credit to a writer who was actually willing to count them up, that matches what Matt McGee said over at MarketingLand a few of days ago). And those ad-related hashtags were mentioned 300,000 times on Sunday, an increase of 273 percent from last year.

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Next Xbox Will Reportedly Have Siri-Style Natural Language Input

One of the most-rumored features of the mythical Apple television set is Siri integration that would allow you to naturally ask questions and issue commands to your TV, but Microsoft may beat Apple to the punch, if a new report from The Verge is accurate. Microsoft already has some voice features built into the current generation Xbox, but the next-gen console will get much-improved abilities including natural language processing powers the report claims.

“Xbox on” command

New voice-based abilities include the option to wake the new Xbox from sleep mode with an “Xbox on” command, as well as a system that can use Kinect to detect people in the room and offer up multiplayer game suggestions. Users can also query the new Xbox to ask it what their friends are currently playing, tell it to pick up playing a movie where it was last left off and more. The new system will also be much better at vocalizing responses to voice-based user input, according to the report, which should make the overall experience feel much more like an ordinary conversation.

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Nexus 4 Owners Estimate One Million Handsets Have Shipped Since November 2012 Launch

Last month we reported how Android enthusiasts on the XDA Developer forum had worked out a method to estimate the smartphone’s production run based on each device’s IMEI number. Going into the end of 2012 the estimate suggested LG had produced about 400,000 devices in total. Now, according to a post on the same forum by member draugaz, Nexus 4 production has passed the millionth device.

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