Infotrade

This 6-inch screen displays black and white e-ink text and images at 800×600 pixels and can roll around a tube the circumference of a dime. If this isn’t the future of print, I don’t know what is. Designed and manufactured by  Polymer Vision , the screen can be rolled and unrolled 25,000 times. The question, obviously, is why would you need a rollable display? Well, as ereaders become ubiquitous the need for them to be almost indestructible. I could see a day when kids get their own ereaders for the nursery a la the  Diamond Age . Interestingly, Polymer Vision isn’t the company of note when you think of e-ink displays so either they will license this technology or they could start taking more and more market shares from leaders like  Eink .

For as long as I can remember, there has been one app that has constantly held the top paid app spot in Apple’s App Store: Angry Birds. Sure, other apps surge to the top briefly. But Angry Birds always comes flying right back. But a new app appears to be bucking that trend. Today is day 3 of  The Heist ‘s reign, and sales are quickening. As  The Loop noted  after a partial day 1, The Heist saw download numbers just over 25,000. This was already enough to overtake Angry Birds. But what’s really remarkable are the day two numbers. There were 89,798 downloads of The Heist on day two. Again, that’s for a paid app ($0.99). There are 86,400 seconds in a day so… yeah, the app is selling at a pace better than one a second. Crazy. In total, that puts downloads now well north of 100,000, and revenues are nearing $100,000 already. In fact, they’re likely well past that number as I write this seeing as the app is also still the top-grossing app in the App Store. So what is fueling t...

Facebook shares on private secondary markets like SecondMarket and SharesPost  spiked briefly  in March to $34 – an $85 billion valuation. But they settled down to around $31.50 after that and have mostly stayed around that level since then. But something caused the shares to surge past that old record to a solid $35 per share in this week’s auction. Our guess is that  newly public LinkedIn’s  somewhat impressive P/E ratio of 2,500 may have something to do with it. $35 per share values Facebook at roughly $87.5 billion. Which is a steal compared to the way the public markets are valuing LinkedIn. We are writing SharesPost members like you who indicated they would like to occasionally receive news from SharesPost. We would like to inform you that SharesPost’s affiliated broker-dealer completed its auction of 100,000 shares of the Class B Common Stock of Facebook, Inc. yesterday, May 26th. A clearing price of $35.00 was established at the auction. Members submitting Q...

Facebook has no iPad app.  It’s ridiculous . Their iPhone app is the most downloaded app in the history of apps. And third-party iPad apps (many of which aim to  trick users ) constantly dominate the top 10 lists for both free and paid apps. And yet, Facebook doesn’t seem to care at all about the device. Because they’re  all about HTML5 , right? Well, someone might want to tell the Seattle office that. On  the jobs page  for the  relatively new Seattle Facebook office, one of the openings is for “Software Engineer, Desktop Software”. Desktop software.  Desktop . Before the damn iPad. Hey Facebook, 1986 called, they want their strategic vision back. Seriously though, this isn’t just one engineer they’re looking for to work on fun products (like the nifty, but experimental  Mac Desktop Notifications app ), this is an  entire team they’re building. Again, to work on desktop apps. The job description: The desktop software team is a new team at F...

The folks that brought you  It’sthisforthat  have created another way to make your life just a little bit easier and funnier. Meet  DryerBro , an app that uses an accelerometer to let you know when your laundry’s done. With DryerBro you put your iPhone or iTouch on your laundry machine and it texts you and the remaining members of your laundry party when your laundry’s done. I’m thinking this is going to be HUGE. I mean Facebook took off at colleges right? Once set up, DryerBro uses an accelerometer and Twilio to send a SMS, email or call to multiple phones when your unmentionables are ready to be picked up. Says creator Eric Kerr, “We live in a house with 11 dudes, and we’re seriously unorganized about laundry. We all want to use the machine on the weekends, but no one ever knows when the last load was done. It bothered me as hackers that we had the tools (accelerometer, Twilio) to solve the problem, but didn’t do anything about it.” So they built DryerBro. “We origina...

The recent articles proclaiming that  25 is the peak age  for entrepreneurship deserve a considered and factual response. The demographic and racial profiling that has plagued venture capital and tech entrepreneurship has a new friend— ageism . This has to stop. Anecdotal Evidence: It does not take but one minute to look around the world and prove any thesis of a peak tech founder age incorrect. There are countless entrepreneurs over the age of 30, including Reid Hoffman (age 35 in 2002), Evan Williams of Twitter (age 35 in 2007), Mark Pincus of Zynga (age 41 in 2007), Arianna Huffington of the Huffington Post (age 54 in 2005), among many others. A commonly held belief is that younger founders appear to inspire waves of innovation, like in the mid-1990s and even today with Facebook, while older entrepreneurs launch sustainable businesses. The reality is more complicated. There are older inventors and entrepreneurs, like Dean Kamen (age 60) or Elon Musk of SpaceX (age 39), who...

PayPal has filed a lawsuit against Google following the  announcement  of Google's new Wallet and Offers features,  claiming  that the company stole PayPal's "trade secrets" to create the services. PayPal notes in its complaint that a key PayPal employee moved to Google following failed negotiations for Google to adopt PayPal as its go-to payment platform on Android. Google Offers is a Groupon-like service that distributes coupons, while Google Wallet can store credit card and rewards information and communicate them with  Near Field Communications  (NFC) on capable Android phones. Google announced the launch of the two features on Thursday, and PayPal filed the suit the same day in the state of California. PayPal claims that it had been "developing capabilities to provide large retailers with next generation 'mobile payment' point of sale technology and services." The company further points out that a former employee who had "intimate knowledg...

Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) has  called the PROTECT IP Act  "a threat to our economic future and to our international objectives." He characterized its  predecessor  as a "bunker-busting cluster bomb when what you really need is a precision-guided missile." The bill would force Domain Name System (DNS) operators to stop correctly resolving the names of so-called "rogues sites." Is this sort of monkeying with the DNS a problem? Yes, say DNS experts in  a new report  (PDF) on the practice. In their view, DNS filtering provisions would make the Web less secure—and do little to stop illegal filesharing sites. These rerouting measures "would weaken this important effort to improve Internet security," the paper contends. They would "enshrine and institutionalize the very network manipulation" that DNS security components fight "to prevent cyberattacks and other malevolent behavior on the global Internet, thereby exposing networks and user...

The G8 group of countries—France, Italy, Germany, the UK, Japan, Canada, Russia, and the US—met this week in Deauville, France to talk about a huge list of issues, including the Internet. In a  lengthy statement released at the end of Friday's meeting, the countries agreed on a 22-paragraph communiqué in which they lay out their view of the Internet—and make clear that laws apply in cyberspace exactly as they do in the real world. The document says plenty of good things about free expression, the democratizing power of the Internet, and the need for "non-discrimination and fair competition." It also notes that these goods “must be included in a broader framework” of respect for the law and of protection for intellectual property. This framework "must receive the same protection, with the same guarantees, on the Internet as everywhere else." And that means, when it comes to intellectual property, that more enforcement is needed. With regard to the protection of ...

The pitch isn’t the only thing that will make your business successful; far from it. But it sure does matter when you have an opportunity to get on stage and present.  Those opportunities may be few and far between, but you don’t want to blow them. And opportunities to pitch your business  should happen all the time  – because ultimately we’re always pitching, whether it’s investors, customers, business partners, candidates, spouses, or random people we catch on the street. Pitching and presenting are critical skills for startup owners. After attending the  YES Entrepreneurship Conference  and watching a handful of young startups do their 5-minute pitches, and jotting down some notes,  here are 15 quick pitch tips.  First, let me say that I was impressed with all the presentations. For very early stage startups, with minimal (if any) pitch / presentation training, they did a good job. Pitching isn’t easy. And it takes a long time to learn how to do we...

Are you looking for the fast track to starting your business? You want to make sure you hit all the high points but don't get bogged down in too many fine points that lead you nowhere, right? Then read this guide, and get your business running in less than a month. Week 1 Day 1: Start with a viable idea. Start thinking about whether your core idea makes a viable business. How do you know? Well, honestly, you don't always. It does help to take a step back from the idea, try to be honest and objective with yourself, and ask these questions: Does anybody need (or want) what we're going to be selling?  How bad is the need, or how much do they want it? Think about it in commonsense terms. Vigorous market research will come later. Will they pay for it?  While they say people will beat a path to your door for a better mousetrap, that's not always true. Think about it in your case. Are they paying for something else, now, already?  Can we go from that to honestly believing t...