Autor: HCFG

One of my fave and most used features on the Moto X(s goog) smartphone got a little bit smarter: Motorola improved the Touchless Control app with a new update available in the Google Play Store. As noted by Android Central, the app now interacts with more Google Now commands even when the Moto X is locked. And, assuming nobody is around, you can unlock your Moto X by speaking your PIN code. Lastly, the app has a new listening sound when you say “OK Google Now”; just in case you weren’t sure the phone was always listening. (Hint: It is.)

Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins’ aggressive bet on cleantech has turned out to be a major driving force behind its struggles and recent shakeup. We’ve covered the topic many times (see the dangers of righteous investing) but Pandodaily nicely captured this week the essence of what’s at stake for Kleiner’s leader John Doerr — the guy who ushered Kleiner into its internet investing heights of the 90’s and led the decision to go whole hog into cleantech in recent years — if he can’t right the ship.

However, underlying Kleiner’s cleantech missteps is the reality of the short comings of traditional venture capital itself. Entrepreneurs, tech execs and media in the Valley look to the institution of venture capitalism as being the engine of innovation and the revolutionary spark needed to ignite disruptive change. But it’s actually just one way to fund innovation and it’s only proved…

Nintendo has registered and renewed the trademark for the brilliant Metroid Prime series. The status date for the trademark was renewed and registered on August 13th, 2013. It’s common practise for companies to renew their trademarks, but it would come as a welcome surprise to many if Retro Studios were planning to develop another game in the Metroid Prime series for the latest Nintendo home console, Wii U.

Thanks, Mike S

The carrier M&A rumor mill is again spinning at full speed. This time, according to the Wall Street Journal, Sprint(s s) is revisiting the idea of acquiring of T-Mobile(s tmus), something Sprint wasn’t in position to do before SoftBank took control of the company.

The Journal’s unnamed sources said Sprint is only weighing a bid and hasn’t decided whether the deal would meet the regulatory test. Since the Federal Communications Commission and the U.S. Department of Justice shot down AT&T-Mo(s t) in 2011, regulators have let big acquisitions through, such as T-Mobile’s acquisition of MetroPCS, but no one has attempted to combine any of the big four nationwide operators.

When asked about mobile consolidation in a recent interview with Gigaom, new FCC chair Tom Wheeler didn’t come out and say he wouldn’t tolerate any mergers among the top tier carriers, but he did make it…

Nimble Storage’s opening day wasn’t too shabby. The storage vendor started the morning at $31.10 per share, up nearly 50 percent from the $21 opening day share price  set Thursday for a total expected take of $168 million for 8 million shares and a valuation of $1.48 billion. Shares traded as high as $35.13 before settling in to close at $33.93, up 61.57 percent on the day.

San Jose-based Nimble, trading on the NYSE under ticker symbol NMBL, makes hybrid storage systems that mix fast flash drives with more traditional (and less expensive) disk drives, knitting them together with management software.   In storage overall it competes with all-flash players like IPO-bound Pure Storage and Nimbus and EMC’s new XtremIO flash arrays as well as hybrid arrays from EMC, NetApp(s ntap) and others.

NMBL data by YCharts

Apple’s next big opportunity may be in China, but that doesn’t mean the U.S. still isn’t a big market for the iPhone(s aapl). As the country reaches smartphone saturation — the point where nearly everyone has a smartphone — Apple’s iPhone could account for a whopping 68 percent of the U.S. market by 2017, which works out to around 180 million handsets.

The figures come from industry analyst Horace Dediu, one of the best in the business from my perspective. And they’re not based on simple forecasts either. Dediu has a knack for leveraging statistical analysis that’s far more often right than wrong. The numbers for this particular forecast are based on Dediu’s research on smartphone uptake in the U.S.

This graph, for example, measures the historical smartphone penetration in the U.S. and Dediu found that sales of iPhones follow the same velocity as overall smartphone sales.