Technology often comes together at the intersection of useful, important, and mind-boggling when it helps someone in need. Today BrainGate announced an invention that encompasses all three — a robotic arm controlled by your brain.

I constantly tried to move things with my mind when I was younger (see: five minutes ago). One day I was staring at the refrigerator door willing anything to move when suddenly a paper fell to the ground. Obviously, I was now magical and headed to Hogwarts soon. Then I realized it was being held by a crappy magnet that fell. BrainGate has made this sort of experience real. The company is testing technology controlled by the mind and that ultimately could help a lot of people with paralysis.

According to Reuters, the company uses a sensor packed with 96 electrodes, which essentially listens to the brain. The sensor is implanted into the “motor cortex” of the brain and begins reading nerves signals to perform actions.

A video released by the company shows a 58-year-old paralyzed woman moving a robotic arm created by BrainGate with this sensor. She thinks about the way her arm would pick up objects and the robotic arm moves to accomplish the task. The video starts off with her moving the arm toward pink targets that pop up at various points along a table. Listening to the brain waves, the arm moves up and down the table to reach each target.

After successfully hitting all the targets, the team gives her a coffee thermos. She is able to bring the arm down to the mug, move the fingers to grasp the thermos and bring it to her mouth. This was the first sip of coffee she was able to bring to her mouth without help in 15 years.

BrainGate, whose motto is “Turning thought into action,” is continuing the study with another individual as well. The company focuses on helping people with paralysis as well as those who are without limbs.

Check out the video from BrainGate below:

hat tip Reuters

What a difference a rumor makes. Samsung, which supplies some of Apple’s mobile parts, lost $10 billion off its market cap yesterday after a report surfaced that Apple had taken some of its business elsewhere.

Yesterday, DigiTimes reported that Apple turned to the financially troubled Elpida for a large order of dynamic random access memory, or DRAM. The Japanese company, which recently filed for bankruptcy, could act as an agent for keeping competition high and prices low among Apple suppliers, according to Reuters. And the move is already starting to take a toll on Apple’s current DRAM manufacturers.

South Korea’s Samsung and SK hynix both experienced major drops in stock. Samsung suffered a six percent loss, plummeting far enough to make it the largest drop the company has experienced in four years, says Reuters. SK Hynix also closed down nine percent.

While Apple and Samsung have had a seemingly strong relationship on the supplier side, the two are embattled in lawsuits over a large variety of infringement cases. Most recently, Samsung was effectively spanked by a California judge who said the company was taking too long to comply with discovery orders. The judge ordered that Samsung not be allowed to defend itself in that particular case using the evidence it failed to hand over in the discovery process.

via Reuters; Image via Kyle Taylor, Dream It. Do It. World Tour/Flickr

What a difference a rumor makes. Samsung, which supplies some of Apple’s mobile parts, lost $10 billion off its market cap yesterday after a report surfaced that Apple had taken some of its business elsewhere.

Yesterday, DigiTimes reported that Apple turned to the financially troubled Elpida for a large order of dynamic random access memory, or DRAM. The Japanese company, which recently filed for bankruptcy, could act as an agent for keeping competition high and prices low among Apple suppliers, according to Reuters. And the move is already starting to take a toll on Apple’s current DRAM manufacturers.

South Korea’s Samsung and SK hynix both experienced major drops in stock. Samsung suffered a six percent loss, plummeting far enough to make it the largest drop the company has experienced in four years, says Reuters. SK Hynix also closed down nine percent.

While Apple and Samsung have had a seemingly strong relationship on the supplier side, the two are embattled in lawsuits over a large variety of infringement cases. Most recently, Samsung was effectively spanked by a California judge who said the company was taking too long to comply with discovery orders. The judge ordered that Samsung not be allowed to defend itself in that particular case using the evidence it failed to hand over in the discovery process.

via Reuters; Image via Kyle Taylor, Dream It. Do It. World Tour/Flickr

Streaming video service Netflix is rolling out a spanking-new design for its website’s video player today, which may make people think twice about favoring their set-top box over the web browser.

As you can see in the screenshots below, the new player is gorgeous. The design better matches the user interface on Netflix’s main navigation pages. Player buttons are larger, as is the text displayed, both of which will be helpful for people who have a big enough screen to sit a few feet back when watching videos.

Another huge improvement is the navigation between episodes of a TV series. Previously, the Netflix web video player was pretty bland, and didn’t provide you with much more than the title and episode number of a show. I suspect this is because more people are primarily using Netflix to watch TV content instead of movies (which don’t really require navigation). Now, when a video is paused you can hover over the “forward” button to bring up a thumbnail of the next episode and a short description. Clicking the button next to it will bring up a full list of episodes within the current season of a particular TV series. There’s even a progress bar for each episode to show you how far along you’ve watched.

I’ll admit, I rarely use the website when it comes to Netflix because it lacks these basic pieces of functionality. But that could change now that the company has wised up.

The new video player design should work fine in most browsers, provided you have the most current version of Microsoft’s Silverlight plugin downloaded. Let us know what you think of the design changes in the comment section below.

Filed under: media, VentureBeat

VeriFone’s Sail mobile payments platform was clearly a Square wannabe from the beginning — now it seems that’s more true than we initially thought.

VeriFone apparently lifted significant chunks of its user agreement from Square, GigaOm’s Ryan Kim has discovered. While there are other competitors similar to Square, like PayPal’s Here and Intuit’s GoPayment, VeriFone is a latecomer to the mobile credit card swiping game. I gave Sail flack for not bringing anything new to the market, but today’s revelation makes it even clearer that VeriFone is more interested in following Square than doing anything truly original.

Writes Kim:

When I notified VeriFone that wholesale portions of its user agreement had been copied from Square Tuesday afternoon, the company promptly deleted about a third of its user agreement – including most of the offending text. The SAIL agreement went from 10,525 words and 43 sections to 6,452 words and 25 sections with a couple mistakenly numbered twice.

VeriFone then sent along a statement, saying, “While many legal documents tend to use and reuse industry-acceptable language, we took your feedback into consideration and have made revisions to the agreement so that there is no misunderstanding.”

While a seemingly good excuse, Kim points out that Sail’s user agreement lifted very specific portions of Square’s. A section regarding how the services handle account histories is identical, save for “Sail” replacing every reference of Square. After Kim’s inquiry, that section and others like it were removed from Sail’s agreement.

Square is still deciding how to respond to the news. Sean Kane, a lawyer at the firm Pillsbury, tells Kim that Square could conceivably sue VeriFone for copyright infringement, though that rarely happens when it comes to user agreements.

We’ve asked for further comment from VeriFone, and will report when we hear back.

Small business startup Wave Accounting has raised $12 million in its second round of funding. Wave offers free accounting software for small businesses.

Wave feels that managing “the books” is a complicated and dreaded task that isn’t any easier thanks to desktop accounting software.

“I experienced the pain first hand of trying to run your books and I really despise all those back office tasks,” said co-founder Kirk Simpson in an interview with VentureBeat. “[I wanted to] simplify the administrative tasks that small businesses despise.”

Simpson thinks high-end accounting software is so complicated that most business owners need to spend far too much time learning how to use it. He created Wave as a simpler solution that clueless business owners could use to manage their accounting.

“There’s a disconnect between small businesses owners who hate doing this and yet they are being asked to pay hundreds of dollars to pay for desktop and cloud [accounting] software,” said Simpson.

Competition in this space ranges from high-end offerings from Salesforce, Zoho, and NetSuite to cheaper and even free services from Kashoo and Outright. Wave bets on its completely free offering and super-simple design to help it stand out. Wave makes it money solely from advertising services to its customers.

Social+Capital Partnership led the $12 million round. Charles River Ventures and OMERS Ventures also contributed.

Wave Accounting is based in Toronto, Canada. The two year old company has raised $19 million in funding in the last 18 months, since its launch.

Man with financial chart image via Shutterstock

Today, Fab.com is launching its third and most ambitious version of the site, and CEO Jason Goldberg said it’s going to remind you of window-shopping with your best friends.

“Imagine you’re shopping with your friends, and one of them picks up a shirt and says, ‘Oh, that’s cute!’ We think we can replicate that online,” the founder told VentureBeat in a recent phone call.

Fab is accomplishing this not just with a few dinky plug-ins or add-ons, but with a wholesale redesign that will “really get the experience of shopping with friends — not just what they bought, but what they’re tweeting, what their pinning, what they’re liking,” Goldberg said.

Fab.com 3.0

The relaunched Fab homepage will feature algorithmically derived featured products based on real-time activity from Fab members. It will also show you a ticker for what’s being bought at any given moment.

Starting today, members can see what their friends from various social networks are noticing and buying in real time. They can also choose to pin items on Pinterest or even make a purchase directly from this live feed.

And Fab is bringing a much-needed search module to the site, so you can drill down for specific products, designers, and categories.

The new Fab.com will also feature Smile pages to give members in-depth profiles and stories about the designers behind Fab’s product inventory.

“It’s about making people smile,” said Goldberg. “We’re showing them that e-commerce can be fun. … We care more about that, about the long-term relationship, than just about making money.”

Here’s a sneak peek at the new designs:

Getting social shopping right

“We want to take the fab product and design up another level … we want to reimagine social shopping.”

As a longtime Fab fan myself, I cringe at the thought of bringing more noise and clutter to the clean, lean shopping experience I’ve grown to appreciate. But Goldberg and the rest of the Fab team, ever focused on great design, are several steps ahead of me, natch.

“Everything we do has to be well-designed,” the CEO said. “Social can’t be a bolt-on; it has to be part of the core experience and designed really, really well. I personally design everything that goes on the screen … a virtual product doesn’t get on Fab unless I think it’s a great product.”

Last year, Fab brought its members a live feed feature to show Fab members’ buying, fave-ing, and liking activity in real time. The decision to focus on the social side was a direct result of Fab’s organic social activity: More than half its members as of last December had come to the site through social channels.

“It has to be authentic,” Goldberg told us. “Up to 40 percent of our traffic comes from social feeds. You can’t force that. Social isn’t just a way to get something from the user; it’s a way to give value to the user. The traffic will come when you deliver a great experience.”

In the end, the live feed turned out to be a huge success, with 15 percent of visits to the feed resulting in an actual purchase. That metric proved to the Fab team that a more social direction could also be more profitable.

The growth continues

As previously mentioned, Fab’s growth has been a bit legendary in the tech startup scene.

One of its more recent success stories involved integrating with Facebook’s Timeline. The startup saw a 50 percent increase in traffic from Facebook since its Actions integration) at the beginning of 2012.

As a result of that and other factors, Fab more than doubled its membership in the first quarter of 2012 (from 1.2 million at the end of 2011 to a whopping 3 million members in March 2012.

“Now, we’re at 3.25 million users in the U.S., nearly 4.25 million worldwide, and we’re a couple weeks shy of our first birthday,” said Goldberg.

One area of growth that’s still a bit mysterious is Pinterest. “We get about 2 percent of our traffic from Pinterest today,” said Goldberg. “That number came out of nowhere in February, and it’s held steady since then.”

But Fab users have expressed a deep and abiding love for Pinterest, and the Fab team is making pinning more integral to the Fab.com experience. That 2 percent might see a bit of an increase as a result.

Combating feature creep

Fab’s new-feature rollout schedule is unrelenting, but Goldberg said he and the rest of the team have an eye on feature creep and will always aim to maintain Fab’s simplicity — one of the things that makes the site such a pleasure to use in the first place.

“Keep it simple. The best design gets out of users’ way and lets them do what they want to get done,” he told us.

“A lot of sites end up building silos of features. If you go to Fab.com today, in our top navigation, there are eight different items. We’re simplifying that to four in the new release.”

He concluded, “Even when you add, you make it simpler.”

Fab.com launched in June 2011 and has received $51.3 million in funding to date. Its most recent cash infusion was a stunning $40 million Series B last December.

Image courtesy of Robbi, Shutterstock

Have cash? Looking for tech talent? Go to Europe. So says Konstantin Geurike, co-founder of LinkedIn and newly minted venture partner in Berlin’s EarlyBird Ventures. EarlyBird recently raised $100 million for its fourth fund, focusing on European, and in particular German startups.

“I think given the amount of money available, the shortage in Silicon Valley is in technical talent,” says Geurike, “I have no doubt that some European startups with strong talent and the right startup know-how will be able to out-execute Silicon Valley companies.” One of Geurike’s new tasks at EarlyBird will be to help European companies break into the U.S. market.

Geurike, who is German but studied engineering at Stanford and is based in Palo Alto, wants to support other European founders who could make a global impact. “My goal is to help portfolio companies to become a success on a global scale,” he explains.”I will probably end up working most closely with one or two founders who decide their best opportunities for global impact come from leading their business from Silicon Valley, while keeping most of the staff in Germany, where it is easier to attract and retain technical talent.”

I asked Geurike how European startups compare to their Silicon Valley counterparts. “European founders tend to think more about revenue early on. That can be an asset, but also somewhat limiting. However, given the greater impact you can have these days with modest or no funding, I think European entrepreneurs can break free of these constraints, and smart money will find them.”

Berlin has long been a startup hotspot and pulls in founders from all over Europe drawn by the cheap living costs, vibrant culture, and expanding startup scene. The founders of audiophile social network SoundCloud, for example, which recently raised $50 million, are Swedish. Ashton Kutcher’s latest Berlin investment Gidsy was started by a couple of brothers from Amsterdam. Kutcher, at least, makes following the smart money to Berlin look like fun.

The problem with most magazines is that they’re just too quiet. Flipboard, the gorgeous iPad and iPhone reading app, is teaming up with SoundCloud to add audio content to its mix of news, photos, and social media.

The partnership kicks off with some impressive additions: You can listen to NPR and Public Radio International shows on Flipboard, even while reading other content on the graphics-heavy aggregator. You can find these programs in the content guide under a new Audio category. To play or pause your current audio track from anywhere in Flipboard, tap the music icon on the top of the screen (iPhone) or lower corner (iPad).

In another great use of sound, Flipboard has added VoiceOver features that let visually impaired users listen to articles on the app.

If you already use SoundCloud, just add your login on Flipboard’s Accounts screen and SoundCloud will appear as a new tile on your main Flipboard page, alongside your other topics such as photography, tech, or fashion. Tap, and you’ll be taken to a SoundCloud landing page where you can navigate to your stream and see what sounds friends and family have shared, as well as your SoundCloud Likes, Sounds, Sets, and Groups.

Just last week, SoundCloud unveiled the beta version of its new web app, Next, which featured continuous play and improved social features. The move towards social makes the company a natural fit for Flipboard, which already lets you add accounts for 10 other popular social services, including Facebook, Twitter, Google Reader, Instagram, Tumblr, 500px, and Sina Weibo.

Flipboard has also added support for Readability and Pocket to make it easier to enjoy content in-depth later. There is also a new Japanese version of the app, released today.

A week after previewing the revamped Bing, Microsoft has released the latest version of its search engine to people in the U.S. Head over to Bing.com/new to test out the new social features as well as annoy your friends with questions in the process. It doesn’t have all of the new bells and whistles announced last week, and you can only sign in with a Facebook or Windows Live account — though Quora, LinkedIn, and Twitter support should be coming soon.

New Bing has a gray sidebar on the right that, once you login with Facebook, shows all the new social features. When you search a topic, new Bing will list friends who might be able to answer your question and help with the search based on whether they’ve “liked” or mentioned something with that keyword in it. It even shows any relevant images they’ve posted.

You can then post a question directly to Facebook or specific friends in the know from the sidebar. If you find something useful while searching or want to answer a buddy’s question with a link, you can post the URL directly to Facebook from the sidebar. Relevant Twitter results from random people are also sometimes shown at the bottom of the box under “People Who Know”.

Most of my test searches showed no “Search With Friends” results, even for things I know my friends love and post about often such as cats, cheese, Dollywood, robots, or the Maker Faire.

Earlier this year when rival company Google first attempt to mashup your social graph and search habits via “Search Plus Your World,” the results seemed invasive and annoying. Second-place Bing seems to have learned a bit from Google’s stumbles, cordoning off the social element on the far right side of your screen.

However, even if the social/search feature was more helpful, I’m not sure there’s a big need for this kind of integration. Most people have mastered searching for things themselves, or posing questions to Facebook. If they haven’t, I usually send them to lmgtfy.com.

via Search Engine Land