If you’ve been put off by the (arguably obtrusive) Special Offers on the Kindle Fire HD, Amazon has just announced that they will allow users to pay $15 to opt-out of the ads for the life of the device.

An Amazon spokesperson wrote:

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Chris Hawker, the founder of Trident Design, LLC, has over 20 years of experience developing and commercializing his own and others’ inventions. His most famous product, the PowerSquid, was the subject of a six-part series published in TechCrunch called the Song of the PowerSquid.

As the president/founder of Trident Design, LLC, I’ve been inventing and commercializing products for 18 years, and all the successful ones get knocked-off. 
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Here’s a heartwarming story for a Hackathon Saturday: Chad Ruble’s mother suffers from aphasia due to a stroke. She hasn’t been able to use a keyboard for years because she is simply unable to recognize text. In order to help her, he built a Kinect-enabled interface that lets her move her hand around a series of simple icons – happy, sad, upset, etc. – and other icons that signify degree.

After swiping around the screen a bit, she was finally able to send an email using a few simple hand motions. She was overjoyed. → Read More

Babelverse, the language translation startup that landed the title of “Audience Choice” at Disrupt NYC this past May, has raised a seed round led by 500 Startups along with a group of other angel investors.

Babelverse’s online marketplace provides speech translation services in close to real-time through a worldwide network of human interpreters. Today, Babelverse co-founders Josef Dunne and Mayel de Borniol tell me, its team of nearly 4,000 interpreters spans more than 100 countries and currently covers 642 languages (seriously, I am not sure that I knew there were that many.) We at TechCrunch are actually using Babelverse to translate the live webcast of next week’s Disrupt SF conference into 12 languages. → Read More

It’s that time of year again. Pencils are being sharpened, school buses are making their rounds, and hackers are coding to their little hearts’ desire. The Disrupt SF Hackathon has officially commenced, with over 400 hackers in attendance and over 35 different API sponsors, including AT&T, Nokia, Loku and Ford.

Each hacker and/or team gets 24 hours to develop and product, hacking through the night until noon tomorrow. You can be assured that Red Bull and beer will be a sizable part of these coders’ nutritional equation. → Read More

If you’re wondering why the Spotify desktop software has hardly been updated in a year, it’s because the company is preparing to launch a completely overhauled browser-based version of its streaming music service, multiple sources confirm. Along with moving to the web, the redesign will focus more on discovery, including following the listening habits and playlists of influencers in addition to your friends.

One source even said a lower subscription price for its mobile app could be in the works. With a healthy user base and the record labels’ support, the browser version could help Spotify continue dominating the streaming music spotlight. → Read More

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If you’re using non-Retina-ready apps like Word and you’d like to see things in a clearer light, there’s an app for that. Retinizer is a very simple app that allows you to update standard Mac applications to support Retina displays. Mostly this means that the fonts are much sharper but icons and UI elements are often still fuzzy.

For example, Word looks much better after Retinization although the rulers and buttons are still janky. It didn’t work with Air apps very well and some apps didn’t update at all, including BBEdit and Twitter.
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Oh, to become the Instagram for video! THAT is the dream of scores of new tech start-ups. And, that is the holy grail for all the VCs who continue to plow money into those companies. After all, Facebook just dropped a cool $1 billion on Instagram (well, actually closer to $700 million) – and each of us can now easily capture pristine HD video on our smart phones that we carry at all times. That means personal HD video capture anytime, anywhere, and without any pre-planning. The sheer volume of personal UGC video has exploded. The potential market opportunity is massive. And, it is ripe. If it only were that easy. → Read More