Sony Ericsson is in deep financial trouble.  In order to even stay alive, the company needs a $135.5 million infusion of cash according to a report by InformationWeek.  If they are unable to raise these funds, the venture between Sony Corporation and Ericsson may end up breaking apart and they may not be making any new phones together anymore.

Sony Ericsson had a rough first quarter where they lost $386 million and their sales dropped 36% from the year before.  Sony Ericsson never really had a strong market-share in the smartphone market.  But going forward the company vowed to make phones with high quality cameras and will have a bigger focus on multimedia.

The head of Sony Ericsson U.S. Najmi Jarwala stepped down a couple months ago, but the company also brought back Maria Sharapova to help push their brand more.

Good news for those of you that want the Palm Pre but don’t want to get locked into a 2 year Sprint contract.  The phone without a contract costs about $549.  The phone will be arriving on June 6 for $199 with a two year contract with a $100 mail-in rebate if you buy it from a Sprint store.

However representatives at Best Buy and Radio Shack have confirmed that buying the phone from their stores will allow you to avoid mailing in that pesky $100 rebate yourself.  At those stores the rebates will be instant.

In conclusion, I recommend that if you are going to buy a Pre, get it from Best Buy or Radio Shack.  But if you return it to Radio Shack later on, make sure not to get punched.

GMail is one of the most used e-mail systems across the globe.  Given that there are about 7,000 languages spoken around the world, being able to understand each other’s communication is very important.  Hence Google’s integration of the Translate service into GMail.

In the Google Labs tab in GMail, there is a feature called Message Translation.  If you receive an e-mail in another language with this feature enabled there will be an option where it says “translate message to:” or an option to “change language.”

The feature was announced on the Google GMail blog.

Soccer is a very popular sport all over the world.  Almost every high school and college has a soccer team.  But there aren’t many niche social networks out there that focus on this one sport.  Footbo is soccer-focused social network and they have raised $1 million in funding from Pitango Venture Capital.

Footbo launched last year in June and has about 240,000 users.  Footbo also integrated Facebook Connect into their service.  Built in to the service includes the statistics of soccer players across 70 international leagues.  Users can also predict scores and game winners.  Footbo also offers customized news feeds and can also add blogs and wikis to their own profiles.

This round of funding puts Footbo at $2 million total funding.  The first round was also $1 million and was provided by Pitango.

[via TechCrunch]

I’ve heard of doctors tweeting out live transplants, tweets coming from space, and even a pet door that reports every time the cat leaves.   But now this is getting ridiculous.

An account has been created that uses the aduino environment connected to a toilet.  The account is called hacklab TOilet and it tweets out a random comment everytime the toilet gets flushed.

The guy that put this together used the following hardware: arduino duemilanove, an adafruit ethernet shield, a WIZnet ethernet module, a mercury switch, perfboard, wires, cables, and other misc. components.

Here are some of the tweets that were sent out:
1. “just wait until the rfid reader gets installed and i can call you by name”
2. “flush flush flush”
3. “swooooooooooooooosh”
4. “just wait until the rfid reader gets installed and i can call you by name”
5. “just dropping the kids off at the pool”
6. “maybe you should have faced scylla instead”
7. “arduinos are SO COOL.”
8. “HI VICKI! ”
9. “MISSION ACCOMPLISHED.”
10. “i strongly support eating more fiber as part of a healthy diet”

[via Hack-A-Day/HackLabToilet]

I haven’t talked about Wolfram Alpha much in the past because I had not quite looked into it until recently.  But after watching the demo video, I was quite impressed and could see myself using it for math purposes.

Wolfram Alpha is named after the founder Stephen Wolfram.  The search engine is able to input information that is typed in by the user and use A.I. to output anything related to that keyword.  You could type in a full geometry problem and it would output the solution and give you graphs.  I’m excited to see the project evolve.

From a venture capital standpoint, the first thing you would ask yourself is how would this make money.  Like every other search engine, the easiest way to monetize is through advertising.  StartupMeme caught an advertisement by Lenovo appearing on the side (picture above).

Wolfram Alpha is ready to accept sponsored advertisements right away even the project is still being developed.  If you aren’t able to find search results within Wolfram, the website encourages you to search the web via Google.

Yesterday Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) held an event called WOO.  Yahoo! held the event to announce a new search engine design that they are working on.  The idea of the new search engine is that they will no longer just be showing a bunch of blue links as search results but actually show related objects.  Same song and dance as many other Google competitors.

Like BusinessInsider, I agree when they say that the appeal of search is that it should just be stupid simple.  Type in a keyword and find the result that you are looking for.  Surely there are some glitches with Google’s algorithm as there is a lot of spam that gets indexed.  But that still doesn’t change the fact that everyone loves Google because of how simple it is.

Below is a screenshot of the new Yahoo! search results that I pulled from CNET.  I actually fail to see the difference that they have with Google in terms of local search.  When typing in a business name, you will be able to read the reviews, see pictures, get a map and the contact info of the place, or check out the website.  What is the difference between this and the Google Maps integration in the search results?  If there’s no difference or no value-add, why switch?

Shame on you Yahoo!  We are not impressed.   And on top of not impressing people with a new way to search for local places, Microsoft will be giving you even more of a challenge when they unravel a new version of Kumo next week.

On the positive side, the Yahoo! BOSS platform is growing at a rapid pace  The BOSS API has hit about 1 billion search queries in this month alone.  That is about a 300% growth from 6 months ago.  When it comes to search APIs, Yahoo! is the boss but the actual search engine itself needs a complete revamp.

You have to hand it to the architects with creative minds.  Yasuhiro Ymashita for example build this house that resembles an igloo in terms of the color and the structure.  There is one large window that faces West and the bottom of the house is raised a bit so that it acts as a natural garage with no door.  Ymashita also started an architecture company called Tekuto in 1991.  This house is located in downtown Tokyo.

[via LikeCool]