Rafe's Radar

Tasty little recipe app one-ups Google

SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- When Victor Penev, CEO of Edamam, took the stage here at Demo today and told the audience he was going to show off a recipe finder iPhone app, I was dubious. His statement, "This is so not 2001," didn't help.

App stores are lousy with recipe apps. Many are quite good. I use Epicurious, which I love, and when it doesn't give me what I want, there's Google. I didn't think there could be an opportunity for a new recipe search product.

Edamam is a meta recipe finder, but there'… Read more

Giving 3D a spin at Demo

SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- Is 3D where photography is going? Two companies at the Demo conference here today are betting on it.

ArqBall makes a mobile app that creates 3D images, or "spins," of physical objects. Designed for commerce initially, it lets you quickly create a 3D spinning model of an object for sale and embed it in a sales page. The demo made the creating app look very easy to use: You put your object on a turntable or lazy Susan, put your iPhone in a stand facing it, and run the app. The software creates the … Read more

CircleUp: Crowdfunding for the 1 percent

The idea of helping businesses raise money through crowdfunding didn't start when the JOBS Act began to get traction. Over at CircleUp, which is launching today, the thinking is that the JOBS Act changes things, but "not as much as a lot of people think." At least according to CEO Ryan Caldbeck.

But then CircleUp isn't a crowdfunding site for everyone. Instead, it's a service to help accredited investors -- people with incomes more than $200,000 a year or a net worth of more than $1 million -- find nonpublic companies to invest in. … Read more

Dabble launching 'social graffiti' mobile app

There's a little battle forming up in a new mobile app segment: the graffiti app. The idea with these apps, of which Catarina Fake's Pinwheel is one, is that when you go to a location, you mark that you've been there and then maybe leave a note or a photo. Later, when your friends (or maybe not your friends) show up at the location or nearby it, they can see what you said and add their own comments.

The highest concept of these new companies is Wallit, which makes an augmented reality tagging app. You hold your … Read more

Selling the Apple II: Three true stories

The 35th anniversary of the Apple II introduction today takes me back. I sold Apple IIs in high school. It was the best summer job I ever had, even if I didn't, at first, make much money selling them.

When the Apple II first came to our store, Computer Connection, it really didn't move at all. The little putty-colored console wasn't especially powerful or capable. Our store was in the middle of San Francisco's financial district, and the businessmen who came in to look around were, for the most part, more interested in the Northstars and … Read more

Reporters' Roundtable: Google Glasses you can buy today

It is the coolest tech demo we've seen this year: Google's Project Glass, which is an effort to create a glasses-based heads-up display for the real world.

With the Google glasses, you look out a window and get a weather report overlaid on your field of view. Look at a product and get information about it. Look at a bus stop and see when the next bus is arriving. Share photos. And maybe even look at a face and get the name that goes with it. Who wouldn't love that?

If you can't wait for Google to launch its augmented-reality product, I hope you like snow because Recon Instruments makes a heads-up display product just for skiers. Today, I'm talking with two guests about Google Glasses, the Recon products, and personal augmented-reality in general with:

Martin LaMonica, senior writer for CNET News Dan Eisenhardt, CEO of Recon Instruments

… Read more

LogMeIn launches Cubby: File sync and share done right

Dropbox. It's the Apple of Web storage companies. It's got a clan of fanboys who swear by it. And for good reason: It's simple to use and has some strong features. It's also one of the least flexible products among its competitors.

Holdouts (like me) who want the capability to sync files outside of Dropbox's walled garden -- the Dropbox folder on your desktop -- have to look to other products. Likewise, people who want to store or sync more than 100GB of files.

Personally, I've been using SugarSync, which does two things right: … Read more

Vic Gundotra: How we claim 170M Google+ users (Reporters' Roundtable)

Google launched a redesigned version of the social network Google+ this morning. In the blog post announcing the upgrade, Google Senior Vice President of Social Vic Gundotra wrote, "More than 170 million people have upgraded to Google+." What does that really mean? Are 170 million people using the social network the way they use Facebook? I talked to Gundotra, as well as VP of Product for Google+ Bradley Horowitz, on a special Reporters' Roundtable interview this morning.

When I asked Gundotra how many people are using Google+, he deftly told me I was looking at it wrong. "You have to understand what Google+ is," he said. "It's really the unification of all of Google's services, with a common social layer."

… Read more

Wavii groks the news so you don't have to

Has Techmeme met its match? Or Flipboard? New semantic news analysis company Wavii is launching its automated, personalized news "feed" app today. It's a more modern and more pretty, deconstruction of the overwhelming news barrage we're all buried under. Wavii CEO Adrian Aoun's pitch: "Facebook is good for keeping up with friends, but it's kind of annoying that you can't keep up with your world this way."

Wavii is a smart timeline of the news. Its core value is that it runs its semantic engine against several hundred news feeds and … Read more