Welcome to the world of the sub-$1,000 3D printer. Manufacturer Pirate3D has promised that their Buccaneer printer will cost a mere $347, about $1,700 less than the cheapest extrusion-based printer available. The printer can print at a maximum of 100 microns – the same as the Makerbot’s – and prints at 50mm/s. It connects to your computer or mobile device via Wi-Fi and is made of stamped steel. Continue reading →

Thanks to a new module from video distribution platform Brightcove, the company will make it easier for customers to roll out live video streams on a wide variety of devices. The brilliantly named Brightcove Video Cloud Live module allow Brightcove customers to manage live events with many of the same features as their on-demand video streams. Continue reading →

A day after Groupon released (and then pulled) an iPad app with a new mobile payments dashboard for businesses, today the company is taking the wraps off a bigger piece of news around its larger plans to expand its commerce services for local merchants. Building on its Breadcrumb payments and commerce service for restaurants, which Groupon acquired last year, the company today is rebranding its wider payments service — and the final version of that free iPad app — under the same name. The new iPad app for merchants of all stripes is called “Breadcrumb POS,” while the old Breadcrumb app for restaurants will now be called “Breacrumb Pro.” Both will be here when they go live on the app store. Sound confusing for both to be called Breadcrumb? Streamlining names is usually meant to simplify things. Groupon says that in fact this is what is happening here: “As it turned out, when we spoke to merchants at salons and other retailers, they were fine with the name Breadcrumb,” says Mihir Shah, VP for Merchant OS at Groupon. “It was about how good are the rates, and the quality of the actual POS product and software.” Indeed, it makes sense for Groupon to address these things, considering that the marketing play of targeting those who have never been able to process credit cards before is now a little me-too. “We’re not just targeting simple paymet solutions for those who didn’t take credit cards before,” says Shah. “We’re offering a better service to them.” Both the app, and Groupon’s wider payment services — they also include the Groupon Merchants apps that sit on iPhone and Android handsets, which turn them into credit card readers — are U.S.-only for now. The company is still working on expanding this internationally to the 500,000 merchants it says already use Groupon’s platform for daily deals and other offers. As we noted yesterday, expanding payments services is part of the company’s bigger ambition to take its business beyond daily deals and into other revenue streams. But, because Groupon is coming into the market of mobile payments and local commerce relatively late — Square, PayPal’s here and others have already been here for a while scooping up business – Groupon is being aggressive on both the rates it charges, and also in making the service as easy to integrate as possible into a business. To attract new payments Continue reading →

Today at BlackBerry Live, CEO Thorsten Heins announced the availability of BB 10.1 for the Z10. This first major update to BlackBerry’s next-gen mobile platform starts rolling out today and packs a moderate amount of updates. “By the end of this week, the vast majority of our international carriers will offer this update,” Heins detailed. “US carriers will offer it by the end of the month.” This version brings more classic BlackBerry features to BB 10. Phone contacts can now feature personalized notifications with custom ringtones, vibrations, and LED flashes. Further customization is available with custom notifications for different email accounts. HDR support should improve the Z10′s lackluster camera performance. The software also updates the camera software with improved red eye reduction. The update also supercharges the BlackBerry Hub. Everything should be more fluid and seemless as the Hub can send PIN to Pin messages and offer contact suggestions. International carriers should get the update by the end of the week with availability on US carriers by the end of May 2013. Look for the update here or through the Z10′s software update section. Continue reading →

ShapeUp Club is a startup out of Stockholm which has been making waves recently with a lot of under-the-radar growth. Originally built back in 2008 as a side project, it’s morphed into an interactive calorie counter on iPhone, Android, and web. You get a personal weight loss plan, can track nutrition, exercise and weight. Ok, so it might not sound original set against the likes of bigger players like MyFitnessPal… but… the app has registered 4 million downloads, with 450,000 monthly active users and a growth rate of more than 10,000 new installs per day. So not bad with very little active promotion. Continue reading →

Rightware, a Finnish startup that sells embedded user interface software and performance benchmarking tools to car makers and consumer electronics companies needing to build graphical user interfaces has announced it has closed a $5.2 million Series B round. Investors in the round include Inventure and Nexit Ventures, along with new investor Finnish Industry Investment. Continue reading →