Nerd Stalker

Happy New Year everyone. We wrap a great year of Startup Blog Insights for 2013 with a Best of Startup Blog with Taffy Williams, Examiner.com writer and entrepreneur. We do a deep dive on the top five blogs of 2013. Listen or watch Taffy as he shares some stories around each blog.

At the SF New Tech / MacWorld|iWorld "Old Tech / New Tech" holiday event, the Nerd Stalker crew asked the attendees - "What are you grateful for in Tech in 2013?" Here are their responses. Enjoy!

Nerd Stalker Picks of the Week: Apple's iOS Completely Blew Away Google's Android For Shopping On Christmas - Business Insider http://read.bi/1fL3VqU 12 Maker Pro Trends That Expanded the #Maker Movement in 2013 http://bit.ly/JuVcxY via @make (DC Denison / Make Magazine) Amazon Prime tops 20 million members as company touts its best holiday season ever - GeekWire http://bit.ly/1fL43Hc In-depth Interview: Nimrod Madar of @glassesoff bit.ly/1ijEFfw (SocialGreg | Nerd Stalker) Target hackers stole encrypted bank PINs - source | Reuters http://reut.rs/1fL9eGZ Tech Stocks Hover Near #2013 Highs, Paving Way for #2014 IPOs (Alibaba, Box & Dropbox) (Kara Swisher | AllThingsD) Adolfo's picks of the year: fl.ux Car Share service's go mainstream (Lyft, Uber, Sidecar, Relay Rides). Evernote with after the book (gtd) air server/xbmc google chrome google calendar google hangouts/hangouts on air clearly dashlane ios7 Mavericks Free Greg's picks of t

You've probably seen a lot of press that an App is delivering a promise of losing your reading glasses. If you are 40-64 years old and reading this with glasses, take note of this. We interview Nimrod Madar, CEO of New York based, Israeli developed start-up GlassesOff -  ranked in the Top 5 of the  Medical App category .  GlassesOff  improves reading by enhancing the image processing function of the visual cortex (for the lay people, let's call that the brain). Watch or listen to Nimrod talk about their app with a little about their business as well. 

Photo by Damien Gadal Looking for last minute gifts this eve. Gift cards are the one, right? Check out some data from our friends at CardCash.com . on what gift card should you be buying. CardCash.com, the web’s leading gift card exchange, recently polled nearly 400 of their customers and asked them what gift card they would like to receive this year. If you’re still shopping for Christmas gifts and you’re not sure what to get, gift cards are always a good bet; 80% of Americans plan on giving a gift card as a gift, according to the National Retail Federation. 

How do you make your email work better? We interview Eliot Sun, CEO of kloudless , whose browser plug-in for Chrome and Firefox allows you to seamlessly drive data from email to your cloud storage. Watch or listen as Eliot talks about kloudless, the issues surrounding productivity across apps and the integration of work environments. 

Picture by Michael O'Donnell The Future of Money & Technology Event  held earlier this month in SF Japantown, featured talks from mobile payments to a futurist panel discussion on money moderated by Dan Robles . But, Bitcoin is just the hottest thing in the bar right now as far as chatter goes. Recently, it has cooled in value from a high of $1278.00 on Dec 1 to $706.96 at time of press). We present excerpts from the morning session on Bitcoin from Micky Malka of Bitcoin foundation and Carmen Medina of Deloitte Consulting. Check it out.

Liberty Madison (#ThatTechGirl) and Greg Viloria  (SocialGreg) visited the annual  Future of Money & Technology Summit last week in San Francisco Japantown. As you can imagine, a lot of Bitcoin talk was dominating the air there but we found three startups in the eCommerce ecosystem moving the dial upwards challenging the existing money system -- frictionless payments ( @Pay ), personal finance management ( Nerd Wallet) and cyber-security ( Socure ). Take a look at what our stalkers #ThatTechGirl and SocialGreg found.

listen to ‘NewAer impressive platform at #sfnt’ on Audioboo This is a live interview at the SF New Tech Holiday party. NewAer is an evolution of location based services (LBS) from a team that figured it was about time for your smartphone to become smart. The idea is simple: Have it do things for you, instead of you telling it what to do. They built an engine for it to have automated control over things in your digital life. Then they made it open so you could tweak and customize it to your liking.

The SF Bay Area rental market is tough. In fact, it is the most expensive rental market in the  country says the New Yorker recently . We talk with RentalRoost founders, Nitin Shingate and Vikram Raghavan.  RentalRoost   helps you find the perfect home using search criteria that you select. See how Nitin and Vikram's interesting story of how they came to create RentalRoost.

Who likes lynda.com ? Raise hands. We got re-acquainted recently when they opened their vault in November for a taste test. We had a chance to talk to one of their "content producers" - Nick Brazzi . Nick describes how online instruction has evolved and how lynda.com has evolved with it. Check out Nick's thoughts on today's online video instruction.

This Week’s Nerd Stalker Picks: Yahoo Tells SEC: 31% Of Our Revenue Comes From Microsoft (Danny Sullivan/Search Engine Land) http://bit.ly/18AUaKC Meet the pitcher: HOT Smartwatch CEO @Shariq_Hamid pitches on 12.11 at sfnt ow.ly/rwnea (SocialGreg/Nerd Stalker) Yahoo acquires QuikIO, yet another startup to add to its video team (Hamish McKenzie/PandoDaily) http://bit.ly/18ATaWT Ubuntu Touch OS wins its first smartphone partner (Steven Shankland/CNET) http://buff.ly/18lhePG Microsoft may finally bring back full Start menu with Windows 8.2 http://bit.ly/19eUW0D The Pirate Bay (Domain) Flees To A Volcanic Island (Luke Plunkett/Kotaku) http://buff.ly/18lho9I Speed Round: "Meet Kubo, The Crowdfunded Electric Cargo Scooter Made By Lit Motors" (Colleen Taylor/TechCrunch) feedly.com/k/1hLoOWS The 9 best-selling smartphones in Japan are all iPhones http://bit.ly/1f4FN28 Zackees: Bicyclist's Safety Just Went Up a Couple of Notches nerdstalker.com/

At Broadcom's #GeekPeek13, we were able to "stalk" some impressions of how wearables and other devices need to interact with us moving into the future. A subject called connectivity. Liberty Madison (aka ThatTechGirl) and Greg Viloria (SocialGreg) talk with Eric Migicovsky of Pebble (Wearables), Robert Acker of Harman (Car Connectivity), and   Zak Murase (Investor) about their thoughts on device connectivity from their vantage points. Check them out below!

In San Francisco, Bicyclist's deaths  this year have hit a high- the most since 2001. Why? More bicyclists have hit the road, especially in South of Market Area(SOMA), because of high gas prices, lack of car parking and increased population density to name a few. Enter Zackees . Zach Vorhees and Murat Ozkan developed the gloves for " utility and fashion." Listen to the interview of co-founder Murat Ozkan on the design and philosophy behind the gloves.

Do we take enabling technology lightly? In today's world, processors, chips don't have the cache they once did. Now, Broadcom is changing the game with connectivity enabling chips from everything from car to wearable technology. We were proud to stalk Broadcom's GeekPeek13 event held at Tank18  in San Francisco. Catch reports from Liberty and SocialGreg on some of the applications demonstrated by Broadcom and its partners below.

Nerd Stalker's Top Stories Car-Sharing Just Makes Sense for Airports - right? bit.ly/1cLO7SZ Node Summit Recap Followup: Man searches landfill for $7.9m bitcoin fortune Windows 8 isn’t saving the PC market as sales continue to tank http://t.co/s1HyCVRggn Salesforce adds second $1 million hackathon winner bit.ly/18WLpLz via @SFBusinessTimes Google launches compute cloud (and slashes prices) to rival Amazon Web Services http://t.co/HXwv2BToc6 Nerd Stalker’s Speed Round The New Audi A3 Will Have The Fastest Internet Of Any Car | via @SAI sco.lt/8UWqav Turns Out People Don’t Really Like Being Called “Techies” http://t.co/6Fr3pLjHLD Bio-Sensing Necklace Will Let Wearer Test Their Own Blood And Fluids feedly.com/e/iDUUsFv _ via @PSFK Zappos Turns Baggage Claim Carousel Into Wheel of Fortune http://t.co/X4WcqWWpVu Nerd Stalker Tip of the Week Yule Log 2.0 - Happy Holidays http://t.co/vYEQlEd7HJ Pebble watch https://getpebble.com/ Events 12/9 - Future of Money

Adolfo Foronda of Nerd Stalker demos one of his favorite browser extensions Evernote Clearly.