#9: VideoStudio Ultimate X6
VideoStudio Ultimate X6
by Corel
Platform: 
Windows 7 / Vista / XP
(77)
Date first available at Amazon.com: February 6, 2013
Buy new: $99.99 $89.99
35 used & new from $89.99
(Visit the Hot New Releases in Software list for authoritative information on this product’s current rank.)
See more here: #9: VideoStudio Ultimate X6
#7: Bridge Baron 23
Bridge Baron 23
by Victory Multimedia
Platform: Windows 7 / Vista / XP, Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard
(2)
Date first available at Amazon.com: October 2, 2006
Buy new: $64.95 $56.99
8 used & new from $56.00
(Visit the Hot New Releases in Software list for authoritative information on this product’s current rank.)
See the article here: #7: Bridge Baron 23
An Offer You Can’t Refuse: Bitcoin Startup BitPay Raises $2M Led By Founders Fund (The VC Run By The PayPal Mafia)
BitPay, the startup with ambitions to become the PayPal of the bitcoin world, is today announcing that it has raised another $2 million. And in a kind of poetic justice, the round is led by none other than the Founders Fund, the VC started by what’s commonly called the PayPayl Mafia.
The Atlanta-based startup says that it was not planning to raise any money at the moment — it announced an initial raise of $510,000 only in January. That was its first outside funding after being bootstrapped internally. However, the company also says that it couldn’t say no, considering who was asking:
“We were not looking to raise any capital until later this year, but we could not ignore the opportunity to have Founders Fund involved with BitPay,” Tony Gallippi, co-founder and CEO of BitPay, notes in a news release on the deal. “There’s no single investment firm we would rather have on our team right now than Founders Fund.”
Nevertheless, it looks like the extra money will be used for hiring: there are currently two jobs open for node.js developers “who are excited about bitcoin.” BitPay is also looking for a UX designer. There will also be more investment in its platform and further product development.
Founders Fund partners know a thing or two about payment platforms — given their past experience as founders and senior execs at PayPal and other companies. Their interest in BitPay comes from the fact that it, and bitcoin, in general, appear to be growing like wildfire.
“BitPay’s ambitions have been global from the outset, and at Founders Fund we have been impressed with the company’s tremendous growth as they sign up hundreds of new customers a day, turning the potential for opportunity into a reality,” said Brian Singerman, a Partner at Founders Fund, in a statement.
When we covered the company’s first raise in January, we noted it had already signed up 2,100 businesses that were using its platform to process bitcoin payments. In April, it added nearly that many again: 1,900 merchants, and they are now processing $5 million per month in bitcoin transactions covering areas like electronics, precious metals, “and other low-margin products.” The promise of using bitcoin over dollars is lower fees, and companies are seeing “a large increase in profitability by accepting bitcoin payments,” the company notes.
In addition to Founders Fund, Max Keiser’s fund Heisenberg Capital, a London-based fund focused on bitcoin companies, is also involved in this seed round. It comes as a number of other VCs are also jumping into the bitcoin landgrab.
The terms of this most recent round were not disclosed, the company notes, “although 100% of the existing seed shareholders exercised their pro rata rights to maintain their ownership percentage in BitPay.” Previous investors in BitPay included Shakil Khan (the Path and Spotify former head of special projects, who has also launched his own bitcoin information resource, Coindesk), Barry Silbert, Jimmy Furland and Roger Ver.
Go here to read the rest: An Offer You Can’t Refuse: Bitcoin Startup BitPay Raises $2M Led By Founders Fund (The VC Run By The PayPal Mafia)
Pebble Nabs $15M In Funding, Outs PebbleKit SDK And Pebble Sports API To Spur Smartwatch App Development
Get ready for a whole lot more Pebble. The smartwatch company just announced several software enhancements for the Pebble and a $15M Series A led by Charles River Ventures. Pebble is not going to sit around, scared of iWatch rumors. They’re plowing forward on their own accord and committed to providing the best platform possible for developers and consumers.
“We are pledging to support the developers hacking on Pebble,” stated Pebble CEO Eric Migicovsky told me in an interview. “We want to make the Pebble the go-to place for developers.” And with that the company released its first SDK last month and is following it up today with several big improvements.
The cash injection will be used to increase the company’s software engineering team’s headcount and allow the company to scale to meet still-growing customer demand. CVS’ Partner George Zachery is joining Pebble’s board of directors, a move that excites Pebble CEO Eric Migicovsky.
“George is the one that shared our vision of wearable computing,” Eric told me in a chat this morning. Several angels also participated in the round, but Eric indicated that Charles River Ventures funded the majority of the Series A. This round of funding joins the $375k the company previously received from four angel investors, including Paul Buchheit, a partner at Y Combinator, and Tim Draper of venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson. And don’t forget about the $10.3M Pebble raised on Kickstarter.
“The tremendous response we received from Kickstarter backers validated our belief in the value of a smartwatch as a wearable computer, but also in the value an open platform brings to truly personalizing the watch to their daily activities”, said Migicovsky, Pebble’s founder in a released statement today. “This new investment will help us build out the Pebble development ecosystem and deliver on Pebble’s extraordinary potential.”
Pebble is still working on fulfilling the 85,000 orders placed on Kickstater. To date 70,000 have reached early supporters. “It’s pretty crazy thinking there are 70,000 Pebbles out there,” Eric told me proudly. “Tens of thousands” of additional orders have been placed, Eric said.
The company is aiming for retail availability in four to six months.
Pebble also announced several software enhancements for its smartwatch today. The SDK, which the company appropriately calls the PebbleKit, enables third party apps to send and receive data from the smartwatch.
This two-way communication is a huge step forward for the smartwatch, allowing the watch to display a large variety of information including weather and sports scores or even act as a remote control for the phone itself. Until now, apps were limited to basic functions like just display a watch face or displaying a simple game of snake.
Pebble also released the Pebble Sports API, enabling developers to build GPS-enabled smartwatch apps similar to the RunKeeper app announced a couple of weeks back.
Since releasing its initial SDK back in April, Pebble states the kit was downloaded over 8,000 times, resulting in over 5,000 unique watchapps with 300,000 installs during the last month. Owners are clearly hungry for more Pebble features.
The Pebble was supposed to usher in a new era of productivity by strapping a communication device to our wrist, but the initial feature set was limited even with the first SDK release. However, Pebble is keeping at it and today’s funding announcement and software development release should result in a big harvest of fresh apps.
“Everyone is talking about wearable devices,” Eric explained. “We’re very happy that Pebble is a platform people can build on today.”
Wearables is the next big thing. There’s no denying that. Even if Apple skips the iWatch device, Google Glass and others are pushing forward the thought of wearable computing. But the Pebble is here today and developers have latched onto the platform, outing custom watch faces, games, and apps. With the Pebble, the future is here now.
Read the original here: Pebble Nabs $15M In Funding, Outs PebbleKit SDK And Pebble Sports API To Spur Smartwatch App Development
Google Has Already Removed 8.8M Lines Of WebKit Code From Blink
Google’s decision to fork WebKit and launch its own Blink rendering engine came as a surprise when the company made the announcement just over a month ago. Yesterday at the Google I/O developer conference, the Blink team provided an update about the state of the engine. As Alex Komoroske, a product manager on Chrome’s Open Web Platform told the audience, the team has already removed 8.8 million lines of code from the original WebKit repository.
When Google first announced this move, the company argued that it was doing so because WebKit had become somewhat unwieldy to maintain because of the wide range of platforms it needs to support. In the process, WebKit development slowed down for all of the partners involved. The fork, the Blink team told me at the time, would allow them to “remove 7 build systems and delete more than 7,000 files—comprising more than 4.5 million lines—right off the bat.” Clearly, Google has been moving quickly to identify even more code in the WebKit source.
This not just about removing the crud from WebKit for the sake of it, however. The team argues that just over the last month, this move to Blink has already made all of the developers who are working on Blink far more productive than ever. Indeed, they argued that they don’t really need to hire more people now that they are going it alone because the individual developers are so much more productive.
The Blink team is already doing more than just removing code, too. Google also talked about a number of Blink experiments it is working on, including Oilpan, which tests putting DOM nodes in a garbage-collected heap, and Lazy Block Layout, which examines how the engine can speed up the rendering process for large web applications by just focusing on the parts of a site that are actually currently on the screen. In one demo, this system helped the team to bring down the rendering time of a very large page from 4 seconds to 32ms.
The team also noted that it’s already getting support from other companies that want to contribute, including Adobe, Intel and Microsoft, which just yesterday submitted a formal Intent to Implement to the Blink team to bring its Pointer Events API for interoperable mouse, touch, and pen interactions in the browser.
Continued here: Google Has Already Removed 8.8M Lines Of WebKit Code From Blink