Wisdio, a social QA site like Quora, has decided to up the social QA ante by adding something they’re calling WAR – Wisdio Authority Ratings. These ratings allow folks to recieve answers from authorities on their subject of choice, thereby reducing the number of incorrect answers and, one would hope, increasing the utility of the site.

Founded by Sebastian Zontek, Wisdio aims to help “find the right people to answer questions quickly and reliably,” not unlike many of its competitors. However, the WAR score offers a one-stop shop for folks trying to figure out who to trust and, one would assume, listen to. For example, I can say I’m an expert in Social Media (which I am. I have LOTS of followers on Orkut) but in order to increase my score I need to answer questions about social media. This prevents gadflies from answering questions willy nilly and reduces useless responses.

I’ve yet to find a social QA site that I’d use longer than five minutes but Wisdio is at least trying something a bit different. The company will also attempt to sell content from experts including books, articles, and advice. For example, you could sell your knitting patterns on Wisdio as easily as you could sell your SEO ebook. The goal, then, would be to become the go-to knitting advice person on the site and wait for the huge checks to roll in.

Will Wisdio succeed? I’m generally bearish on these kinds of sites – the Internet is a tumult of voices and rarely, if ever, is the right voice heard at the right time and there are far too many opportunistic “experts” out to game the system – but I’m ready to try anything once and I suspect there are others out there would enjoy Wisdio’s clean interface, WAR rankings, and potential money-making opportunities.

These things are pretty old but sometimes it’s nice to see two dudes really happy about a piece of technology that really works. This ornithopter is made by the guys at FlappingFlight and comes in multiple models including the Park Hawk with “instant glide” feature that allows you to stop flapping and swoop around like a bird of prey at the touch of a button.

At $300 they’re not extremely expensive and they’re a nice change from the smoky sturm und drang of traditional RC fliers.

Product Page via Reddit

Facial recognition company Face.com has just released a new mobile application that takes advantage of its technology to identify the faces of your friends in photos. Called “KLIK,” the app is a real-time, facial recognition mobile camera app for iPhone that automatically identifies your friends by name before or after you take their their photo.

To use the app, you have to configure it with your Facebook account, as that’s how it learns who you friends are. You don’t, however, have to immediately share the pictures you take using KLIK on Facebook – that part is optional.

In most cases, KLIK can identify the person in the frame before you snap the photo, and the name will then appear directly over their face in the camera’s viewfinder. (The name does not appear on the saved photo, of course). If, however, KLIK can’t figure out who someone is, tap “Tag Me” on the unrecognized faces in the saved photos to ID them. As you identify unknown faces and save the photos, the app learns and its ability to recognize those same folks in future images improves.

Although the app could have easily been built just as a “proof of concept” of Face.com’s facial recognition technology, it’s clear that that startup has put some time and effort into the app’s design and feature set. The app isn’t just impressive in terms of its technology – it’s pretty, too.

In addition to the facial recognition bit, KLIK supports some Instagram-like photo filters for making your photos seem more artistic. It also offers feeds of nearby photos and friends photos, tagging photos from the camera roll, and social sharing to Facebook, Twitter, email, and publicly on KLIK itself.

Oh, and did I mention it’s pretty? KLIK requires iOS 4.3+ and a Facebook account to work. The app is available for free here on iTunes.

We get a lot of PR pitches (“Write about our social media network for fish lovers! If you don’t, we’ll take our exclusive to TetraLover.blogspot.com,” “We’ll give you a private jet if you write good things about Apple – Sincerely, Tim Cook,” “Take a look at these iPhone gloves!”) and there are few I’ve dreaded more than writing about the aforementioned iPhone gloves mostly because the founders kept emailing me about these damned gloves. These things come from a Dutch company called Mujjo and they purport to allow you to interact with your iPhone with any part of your hand, including your wrist, knuckle, and palm. The founders must have used them to punch out emails on the icy Hague metro every day of the past month because they were pretty darn persistent.

The question when dealing with these sorts of pitches, really, is two-fold: a) does the product advertised work? and b) will I write about the product after being literally hounded for three weeks by these guys? In answer to both, I would respond with a resounding (literally) “Yes.” They work and yeah, what the heck, Mujjo, people like gloves, right? Also a post will get Mujjo to stop emailing me.

I tried these during a few colder Brooklyn afternoons and, like most gloves, they kept my hands warm. Unlike most gloves, I could use them to tap my iPhone screen. Could they be used to tap your iPhone screen with your knuckle? Sure. They’re full of conductive thread so smack away. Is that a major selling point? Not really, but if you’re paying $30 (25 Euro) for touchscreen gloves, these things better let you touch the very heavens with your triquetrum so this is an acceptable middle-of-the-road solution. So there you have it: gloves that are good as gloves and iPhone interaction tools. A double whammy.

If you’re still with me, let’s discuss the takeaways here:

1. These gloves work well.
2. If you email us enough we will eventually cave.
3. Don’t try that technique with every stupid thing you’re trying to pitch because if the product is absolutely stupid no amount of badgering will win our hearts.

Product Page

A few days ago, at the DLD conference, Groupon CEO Andrew Mason revealed that his three-year-old daily deal company now has 10,000 employees, with about 70 percent overseas. What about LivingSocial, the No. 2 daily deal company? Tim O’Shaughnessy told me yesterday the company is now at 5,000 employees worldwide, with “just under half” in the U.S.

While he won’t reveal LivingSocial’s revenues (the company is still private, and just raised another $176 million in December), he says: “We've grown very significantly in the last 12 months. We entered 2011 with 3 countries,, now we are at more than 20, with 60 million members worldwide, and just around 5,000 employees worldwide. We have been able to aggressively grow the business.”

But what about all of the Groupon and LivingSocial clones dropping like flies? Is the daily deal business winners-take-all, with Groupon and LivingSocial emerging victorious, or is the whole industry in trouble? One recent study, estimates that 798 daily deal clones hit the deadpool in the last 6 months alone.  ”A lot of people started to scale and started to realize they didn't have all the pieces needed to make it work,” says O’Shaughnessy.

The bigger question is whether the whole industry’s moment in the sun has passed. After all, the daily deal business was born in the worst recession since the Great Depression when deals were especially appealing. Now there is deal fatigue, and the economy isn’t in as dire straights. O’Shaughnessy doesn’t see it that way. “The business is not predicated on being in a recessionary cycle,” he argues, pointing to its success in countries like Brazil whose economies are doing well.

Okay, but what about the fact that traffic to LivingSocial has dropped significantly since last summer? In the daily deals business, historically, at least, there was a strong correlation between traffic and transactions. According to comScore, visitors to LivingSocial’s site peaked last June at 11.2 million worldwide. In December it was down to 4.4 million. Groupon also took a hit, peaking at 14.4 million worldwide unique visitors in June, but it’s been growing steadily since September and was back up to 12.5 million uniques in December. (See chart above).

There is another factor to consider here, however. “Everybody knows,” says O’Shaughnessy, “a lot of marketing has gone into this space. Guess what? When you click on an ad and you are taken to a page, that is traffic. Once you get enough users, if you stop doing some of that marketing, you will have a significant drop in traffic.” The daily deal companies were paying through the nose for traffic. It certainly showed up in Groupon’s numbers. And LivingSocial was doing the same thing. We’ll find out when Groupon announces its first earnings quarter, how much it is continuing to spend on marketing, but LivingSocial has pared back and is now focussed on harvesting the 60 million users it already has a relationship with. Also, these numbers don’t measure mobile, which is “an incredibly meaningful percentage of interaction,” notes O’Shaughnessy.

The one thing I took away from my conversation with him is that you can’t be too simplistic in your analysis of these businesses. Not every customer is the same either. the 60 millionth customer does not behave the same way as the 1 millionth, and mobile app users are much more engaged. It is important to look at cohorts of customers (people who joined a year ago versus 6 months ago), and see if older customers are becoming more loyal.

Most importantly, he sees the daily deal business as we know it today merely as an entry point for local commerce. It is version 1.0, and he is already building version 2.0, which could make LivingSocial end up looking significantly different from Groupon down the road. I will delve deeper into where LivingSocial might be headed in another post.

Clearly controversy is swirling around web lockers and online storage companies in the wake of the Federal swoop on Megaupload, but if it all goes wrong rest assured that DropBox founder and CEO Drew Houston has a second career to fall back on.

The World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland (or just “Davos” to those in the know) is a great place for the world’s millionaires and billionaires to loosely affiliate with each-other (as Paul Simon might have put it) and part of that looseness extends to the Piano Bar of the Hotel Europe in the tiny – but 5-star-hotel-packed – village.

A short snow-bound walk past the security checkpoint teaming with soldiers, you can climb the stairs to the hotel bar where Piano singer Barry croons AOR hits most of these magnates will fondly remember. Occasionally he hands the mic over to a willing Karaoke singer, and last night Houston took up the challenge.

His rendition of Rocket Man is pretty good, so we’d like to re-assure anyone concerned that should DropBox find itself shut down by the Feds and Houston’s $400 million net worth (according to Forbes) is decimated by legal fees, Drew can always pick up tips at the Piano Bar in the Hotel Europe.

On the heels of the news that AT&T delivered its best quarter ever in terms of smartphone sales, the communications company and carrier is releasing its quarterly data on the number of AT&T Wi-Fi connections made in Q4 and in 2011 as a whole.

AT&T says that it tripled Wi-Fi network traffic in 2011 versus network traffic for 2010. And the network saw a 550 percent increase in monthly Wi-Fi data uploads from mobile devices on the AT&T Wi-Fi network in 2011, driven by increasing use of cloud services.

In total, 1.2 billion AT&T Wi-Fi connections were made during 2011, with 486.9 million connections made in the fourth quarter (that’s compared to 301.9 million Wi-Fi connections in Q3 of 2011). And connections more than tripled in the fourth quarter versus 154 million connections made in the fourth quarter 2010.

More than three million connections per day to the AT&T Wi-Fi Network by users, exceeding total connections made in the month of December in 2008. Plus, AT&T says that it saw more than 60 percent growth in AT&T Wi-Fi Hot Spots from 2008 through 2011.

The massive growth in Wi-Fi connections is due to the growing number of smartphone and tablet users tapping into AT&T networks at hospitality locations, parks, retail stores, stadiums and enterprise businesses. Hotel locations account for approximately 45 percent of the total AT&T Wi-Fi network traffic. And To date, AT&T has launched free Wi-Fi at 19 park locations in New York City. In 2011, New York City parks visitors made more than 1 million connections to the AT&T Wi-Fi network.

AT&T, which offers nearly 30,000 Wi-Fi hot spots and claims to the U.S.’s largest wi-fi network, says most of its smartphone customers get access to the carrier's Wi-Fi network at no additional cost as part of their plan, and Wi-Fi doesn't count toward customers' monthly wireless data usage.

Olery, an Amsterdam-based startup that offers reputation management and media monitoring tools for the leisure industry, has raised 750,000 euros ($1 million) to boost its international expansion and develop new products.

Founded in 2010, Olery offers simple online brand, reputation management and performance benchmarking tools for hotels that help turn online reviews and social media feedback into actionable business intelligence.

Read more at TechCrunch Europe.

Startup America’s Master Challenge showdown is now underway. This fun, friendly competition pits influential tech groups against each other, to see which one can encourage more startups to join the Startup America Partnership. The winning group gets bragging rights, of course, and will be recognized at upcoming events, like Startup America’s Anniversary and at SXSW.

Past challenges included East vs. West and Feld vs. TechStars, for example. This week’s competition, which kicked off just this morning, is between Tech Cocktail and Startup Weekend.

The Startup America national campaign, chaired by Steve Case, co-founder of AOL and Chairman of the Case Foundation, is meant to encourage and accelerate entrepreneurship across the country. Now a year old, the organization is active in regions where entrepreneurship can really benefit from a push, including Colorado, Illinois, Massachusetts, Tennessee, Connecticut, Florida, and Texas.

Participating startups receive expertise via coaching sessions and VC round tables, access to Microsoft BizSpark and various discounted services, and a funding fees offer from open funding platform IndieGoGo.

The Master Challenge will be underway until March 31st, 2012, and has a goal of recruiting 100,000 startups during its run. Each week, two different groups will compete. You can keep track of the week’s winner here on the Master Challenge Leaderboard. (In case you’re curious, East beat West and TechStars came out on top).

If you’re a startup interested in Startup America, you can help your favorite community win by clicking the appropriate link: Tech Cocktail and Startup Weekend. Happy competing!

The Wii U brand is a bit underwhelming. At best it builds upon a very successive product. But at worst the name suggests its simply an add-on rather than a completely revamped system. A new report just surfaced that sources a Nintendo insider stating the company is considering renaming the next-gen Wii.

Nintendo is quickly spiraling down. The Wii U — or whatever it’s to be called — needs to be a hit. Nintendo cannot misplace another piece in Tetris.

CVG is reporting that following the 3DS disaster the 100-year old gaming company might change its Wii U strategy prior to E3 in June. The 3DS name is essentially the same naming convention as Wii U — a play on the name of the predecessor. However, consumers have seemingly been put-off by the name causing Nintendo to spend more marketing on the 3DS’ name rather than the 3DS’ features.

That can’t happen with the Wii U. Nintendo experienced a net loss of $630 million between April and December of 2011. It needs the Wii U to be an instant hit. The console is set for a 2012 release. Nintendo just needs to decide if it needs a name change (it does).

On Monday of this week, RIM’s new CEO made a statement that set off a bomb on the blogosphere, and I’m not sure he understood its repercussions at the time. “I don’t think any drastic change is needed.”

If you’ve been paying attention to RIM and its numbers, you know that what the company desperately needs is change. Sales are declining, platform market share is dwindling, and the BlackBerry brand, to a large extent, has lost the power it once had behind it. So in a recent interview with CrackBerry, Heins made sure to clarify exactly what he meant by “no drastic change is needed.”

I think this got into a little bit of the black and white zone. I was talking about drastic or seismic changes. What I was trying to address was that there was some suggestion that RIM should be split up or should even be sold. My true belief is that RIM has the strength and the assets that we can really succeed in this market.

There is a LOT of change. There is a lot of structure change, there has been already a lot of change in terms of our software, our software platform, bringing QNX in. There is no standstill at any moment here at RIM.

What I wanted to make clear to the market is that we believe in our own strength, we are BlackBerry, we are an integrated solution, hardware, software, services, and network.

Perhaps, Mr. Heins makes a point. RIM is clearly trying to change. We just haven’t seen it yet.

A QNX-based BlackBerry 10 operating system is a huge step in the right direction, but it was announced in April 2010 and won’t be ready until the second half of this year. Quite the wait, if I may be so bold.

Then there’s the PlayBook 2.0 OS that’s supposed to make its way to us next month, and refreshed hardware to go along with it which hasn’t been given a clear release date. Again, these are solid changes. PlayBook 2.0 brings everything that the first tablet OS was lacking and does it in a seamless, elegant manner. But… the original PlayBook should’ve launched with this version of the OS, even if it meant the launch would be a bit later. Another case of attempted change, but poor execution.

Another change we’ll soon see from RIM has to do with their launch strategy. RIM usually puts out two or three new phones all on the same day. It’s like a BlackBerry explosion. But according to a leaked roadmap, the company seems to finally realize that a staggered approach is the only way to give each device a moment in the sun. It’s a smart move, we just need to experience it.

Finally, the BlackBerry London. Despite the fact that RIM’s bread and butter lies with its full QWERTY keyboard, the company is expected to debut BlackBerry 10 on an all-touch device, codenamed London. I have to say I applaud RIM for this choice, for now.

RIM’s core audience enjoys the full QWERTY, no doubt, and the company will likely continue to be the de facto when it comes to communication and QWERTY handsets. But (yep, another but)… the world is moving to all-touch whether RIM likes it or not. This is the company’s chance to tap into a different, younger segment of the market.

Of course, the London will need to be just about perfect in terms of hardware to get the ball rolling again, especially since RIM’s found itself in an uphill battle.

Long story short, RIM certainly is in the midst of a change. Whether it’s big enough or coming soon enough is an entirely different story.

According to the latest report from Strategy Analytics, Apple has now overtaken Samsung to become the world’s largest smartphone vendor by volume. Apple achieved 23.9% market share during Q4 2011, narrowly beating out Samsung’s 23.5% share.

In addition, Apple shipped 37 million units in Q4, again going neck-and-neck with Samsung and its 36.5 million units shipped during the same time.

However, notes Neil Mawston, Executive Director at Strategy Analytics, “while Apple took the top spot in smartphones on a quarterly basis, Samsung became the market leader in annual terms for the first time with 20% global share during 2011.” Apple’s annual share, meanwhile, was 19%.

In other words, Apple won the quarter, not the year.

Smartphone global shipments reached nearly half a billion units in 2011 (488.5 million units), the firm found, turning the smartphone battle into a two-horse race between Apple and Samsung in terms of units shipped.

Nokia, the one-time smartphone leader, is still holding onto a top spot, in position #3, with 19.6 million units shipped during Q4 and 77.3 million shipped during 2011. But Nokia’s global share has been halved from 33% in 2010 to just 16% in 2011, indicating its ongoing decline.

Although Strategy’s numbers paint the Samsung vs. Apple battle as a tight race between mobile giants, there’s a big difference between the numbers being reported here. As MacRumors points out, Samsung no longer reports its mobile phone sales numbers, while Apple discloses its units sold each quarter. That means analysts are estimating Samsung’s numbers, but Apple’s numbers are provided by the company itself. It could be that Apple’s lead is even greater than what’s seen here.

Update: A report from the analysts at Canalys has just come in, and confirms the same thing – it’s an Apple vs. Samsung battle.

According to the firm’s latest findings, Apple’s record shipment of 37 million iPhones shipped in Q4 beat the previous record held by Nokia of 28.3 million phones shipped in Q4 2010. Another shocking figure: the huge volume of iPhones shipped exceeded the size of the entire market of 4 years ago, when 35.5 million smartphones shipped globally.

The firm also noted Nokia’s shipment of 19.6 million smartphones, calling it “a decent performance given its current transitional state.” However, Canalys stopped short of estimating Samsung’s phone shipments at this time, saying that the company doesn’t disclose these numbers publicly. They did say that Samsung’s quarterly smartphone growth was around 30% and mobile phone shipments were up 10%, though.

Says Canalys Vice President and Principal Analyst Chris Jones, "the numbers are still coming in, but our early take on the state of the smartphone market is that, while Apple and Samsung clearly saw phenomenal performances, many other vendors have struggled. The full impact of this difficult quarter on hardware and software vendors will become clearer over the next week, when final results from the likes HTC, LG, Huawei and ZTE are announced, and Canalys publishes its full Q4 2011 worldwide country-level databases."

Somewhere, someone out there is curled in a corner, sobbing because they missed out on the last HP TouchPad sale. Ebay messed up, he says. It wasn’t his fault. He clicked the button but Ebay’s servers crashed. So now he’s alone. Left to sulk in his missed opportunities.

But fear not, friend! I bring you great news from the land of the Internet! Woot finagled another batch of TouchPad tablets! They’re refurbs and priced higher than before, but they’re TouchPads! But you better act quick! Don’t let another chance to own a failed tablet slip between your fingers!

As of this post’s writing Woot has both models listed but the 16GB is already sold out. That leaves just the 32GB available. And at $219 it’s still a fine deal for a 9.7-inch dual-core 32GB tablet that can run Android. Of course only fanboys should apply. A general consumer would likely get more enjoyment out of a Kindle Fire or Nook Tablet. But perhaps you’re a starving coder, betting your future on webOS now that its going open-source — by all means, buy the TouchPad and lets never talk about it again.

Yesterday, Google filed its 10-K with the SEC, revealing the number of acquisitions and money spent on these purchases in the year. As of Q3, Google had spent over $1.4 billion on 55 acquisitions for the year. Google ended 2011 spending $1.9 billion (including cash and stock) on completing 79 acquisitions during the entirety of the year.

Some of the bigger purchases included ITA Software, which was purchased for $676 million in cash. As we know Google is spending $12.5 billion on Motorola (which isn’t included in 2011′s calculations), with a termination fee of $2.5 billion if the deal fails to get regulatory approval. The transaction is currently expected to close in early 2012.

Some of the acquisitions Google made in Q4 2011 include Clever Sense, Katango, and Apture.

In contrast, Google spent just over $1 billion on 48 acquisitions in 2010. And don’t expect Google to be slowing down the acquisition pace anytime soon. In the filing the company says: Acquisitions will also remain an important component of our strategy and use of capital, and we expect our current pace of acquisitions to continue.

In addition, the search giant’s full-time employee headcount grew 33 percent from 24,400 at December 31, 2010 to 32,467 at December 31, 2011.

Bad news from Japanese tech powerhouse NEC: the company yesterday announced [PDF] a net loss of $1.13 billion in the three months through December 2011, compared with a net loss of “just” $350 million in the same time frame last fiscal. NEC said it wrote down its deferred tax assets.

For the three-month period, revenue dropped from $9.3 billion to $8.7 billion year-on-year. For the full fiscal (which ends in March this year), NEC now expects a net loss of $1.3 billion. The company says restructuring costs alone will cause a $520 million net loss.

As a reaction to these numbers, NEC said it will cut a total of 10,000 jobs worldwide by the first half of 2013.

To be more concrete, 7,000 NEC employees in Japan will lose their jobs, while the rest will be laid off overseas. Among those 10,000 people, a total of 5,000 are outsourced or part-time workers (the other 5,000 workers are full-time NEC employees). Worldwide, the company employs around 116,000 people currently – full-time, part-time and outsourced workers combined.

Exclusive - On a mission to democratize e-commerce and help take the concept of social shopping from fad to reality, Shoply is making its formal debut today after a year of bootstrapping.

The bootstrapping days are over, as Shoply has raised an undisclosed amount of seed financing from former Facebook VP Chamath Palihapitiya and serial entrepreneur and scarily prolific angel investor Fabrice Grinda for its “Fab.com and Pinterest love child” (among other backers).

In essence, Shoply is a marketplace where any small brand or local business can sell wares online. Since quietly launching last year, 10,000 sellers have already found their way to the platform, generating “thousands” of monthly transactions according to founder and CEO Liad Shababo.

Shoply aims to give anyone who wants to sell – from individuals to SMBs – virtually anything online a way to do so quickly and easily, but also actively bring them a steady stream of customers by leveraging social media and technologies, and help them promote their businesses on the Web.

Obviously, that’s easier said than done, but Shoply appears to have nailed what businesses need to successfully establish and promote an online store.

Shoply stores are free to get up and running, with no setup or listing fees, and the startup charges either a 10 percent commission fee on sales, or a premium flat rate of $29.99 per month.

The downside of not charging listing fees is that Shoply will need to a better job monitoring what sellers are putting up on the site (I noticed some – expensive – spam products on the marketplace).

They also don’t currently police shipping fees charged by sellers, so that means you’re bound to raise your eyebrows at total prices sometimes when you shop (e.g. sellers charging a $85 shipping fee for a $45 item is just ridiculous and downgrades the overall experience).

Shababo tells me that they’ve built the site with only 3 people so far, and that those kinks will be gradually removed as they grow the team and take the site to the next level. He also points out that a lot of what gets showcased on the site is there based on user activity, so lousy offers should get organically pushed down anyway.

Indeed, for consumers, Shoply provides a social shopping experience where they can discover and buy unique products from a trove of independent sellers on a single platform. Users can curate products they love and share them with others, but there’s more to it than that.

By following other users, Shoply members can remain updated on all the happenings on the site, such as new products listed by their favourite sellers, or new collections of items created by the users they follow. Shoply uses the available data to provide consumers with suggested lists of products, shops they should be following and other members with similar tastes. I like it.

Shoply is based in London, UK, with offices in San Francisco opening soon.

Android adoption is growing rapidly in Japan, with local handset manufacturers doing everything they can in order to meet the demands of customers in all segments of the population. One particularly attractive target group seems to be women, given how many Japanese companies say they design Android phones specifically for female users.

Here are three recent examples.

First, Sharp has designed a weird “chocolate bar”-type handset that Japan’s biggest mobile carrier NTT Docomo plans to roll out on Valentine’s Day.

The so-called “Q-pot.Phone SH-04D” [JP] comes with Android 2.3, a 3.7-inch LCD with 540×960 resolution, NFC e-wallet function, Wi-Fi, and an 8MP CMOS camera.

Here are some accessories owners can get:

Second, Japanese carrier SoftBank rolled out Kyocera’s HONEY BEE 101K [JP] today, another handset designed with female customers in mind.

This model features Android 2.3, a 3.5-inch LCD with 800×480 resolution, a 5.1MP CMOS camera, a MP5225 dual-core CPU with 1.2GHz, 2GB ROM, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth 2.1+EDR.

Third, Disney Mobile has come up with the DM012SH, a Android 2.3 handset (made by Sharp). It comes with a 4-inch LCD with 960×540 resolution, an 8MP CMOS camera, NFC e-wallet function, infrared, digital TV tuner, Bluetooth 3.0, Wi-Fi, and a microSDHC slot.

Disney Mobile, a Japanese MVNO, is planning to offer the DM012SH (pre-installed with a special Disney UI, Disney apps, wallpapers, etc.) next month. Every buyer will get one the cases below for free:

With the rise of numerous accelerator programs in Europe one cannot help but wonder whether jumping through the application process hoops, sweating through the mentoring sessions and flirting with investors at demo days are all worth a founders' time.

When I attended the recent Startup Sauna demo day in Helsinki in December 2011, I met teams not only from Finland but also from Russia, Poland and the Baltic Rim. I was amazed how young many of the participating entrepreneurs were. So when the performance stats from Startup Sauna hit my mailbox I was curious to learn what actually happens to all those startups after they complete the seven-weeks-long coaching program in the startup co-working space Aalto Venture Garage.

VC firm Highland Capital Partners is sounding the horn for their fifth annual “Summer@Highland” entrepreneurship program. The 10-week program aims to provide young, talented entrepreneurs with the environment and resources they need to kickstart their early-stage technology companies.

The program is only open to current college students, graduate students, and recent graduates (can’t have graduated before December 2011); however, only one of the founders is required to meet this criteria, and founding teams may have as many as four members. The program offers its selected teams the option of working out of the firm’s office space in Cambridge, Mass. or Silicon Valley, enabling them to work closely with the Highland team as well as affording access to its network of founders, CEOs, and experts.

On top of that, each startup is assigned a Highland Partner to be their sponsor, and founding teams receive $15,000, without having to give up any equity in return for the capital, as is the case in many other incubators and accelerators. In this way, Senior VP of Highland Mike Gaiss tells us that the program is designed to be “Founder Friendly,” as startups that shine over the course of the program qualify for seed funding, and yet founders are under no obligation to Highland after the summer is over.

The program has hosted 25 startups thus far, including the founding teams of companies like Wildfire, Gemvara, CloudFlare, Affine, Ksplice, Cogito Health, Imprint Energy, and Adpop. Former speakers include founders and CEOs from Airbnb, Dropbox, SCVNGR, and Hubspot to name a few.

In terms of what it’s looking for in its teams, Highland will give preference to initiatives centered around “a breakthrough idea that is scalable,” specifically for large, addressable markets — and it’s a bonus if your business or product is already showing some momentum and a little bit of traction to boot. Startups must be technology-based or tech-focused, which can include SaaS, digital media, eCommerce, mobile, social media, energy efficiency, robotics, healthcare, etc.

The deadline for applications is twofold, with “Early admission” ending March 1st and regular admission ending April 5th. The program will begin on June 4th. For more information, check out the program here.

Forgive me if you’ve seen this on Boing Boing yesterday already, but I’m always looking for interesting startups in the digital music space, and I think The Sound Supply‘s idea is, well, sound.

Basically, The Sound Supply bundles 10 DRM-free digital music albums and lets you buy the lot online for a mere $15. According to the website, all participating bands and artists – including the wonderful Sophie Madeleine and Colour Revolt – agreed to collectively share their music this way.

The site lets you pre-listen to all albums in the bundle (dubbed the Supply Drop) and also offers a video with a short introduction to all participating artists and bands.

As a commenter pointed out on Boing Boing, the website could be a little more informative. There’s nothing on the site that tells visitors how they can purchase the bundle (you find out this is can be done exclusively via PayPal only after you kick off the buying process), and there’s also no information about the sound quality, format, length, size and so on.

In an email to us, The Sound Supply referred to the site as a music group-buying service, implying that you can buy discounted music albums by purchasing them as a group (e.g. if 50 people agree to buy the bundle for $15, the sale goes through – see fipster) but as far as I can tell this is not the case. Likely, they mean that you can buy multiple albums in one go for a limited time (10 days), but the wording was confusing nonetheless.

All in all, The Sound Supply is not such a bad idea. If you’re into this kind of thing, also check out Sony’s daily deals site for music Pop Market, GroopEase and Hello Music (deals for musicians).