MediaFile

Amazon.com looks like it is trying to move a bunch of used Kindle Fire tablets. The company offered “Certified Refurbished” Fires for $139, versus a regular $169 for refurbished models, on the Gold Box daily deals page of its web site on Wednesday. New Fires go for $199.

Shoppers can buy up to five of the gadgets each, according to the web site.

“Each Certified Refurbished Kindle Fire is a pre-owned Kindle Fire that has been refurbished, tested, and is certified to look and work like new,” Amazon said. “They come with the same one-year limited warranty as a brand-new Kindle Fire.”

The offer runs through May 2 only, or until the refurbished devices run out, it added.

All across Europe, journalistic online startups are launching, aiming to produce and disseminate news in new ways. In our brave new world, the nimble startups of tomorrow were supposed to be overtaking the lumbering dinosaurs of yesterday online. But nearly all of these startups, even the most impressive and innovative sites, are struggling to survive because they face structural and strategic challenges that are not always recognized upfront. To succeed, European journalistic startups need to recognize these challenges, move beyond simply imitating others and find their own paths ahead.

The structural challenges for European journalistic startups have to do with the competition they face in content and advertising.

Startups are trying to establish themselves in a market for online news that is dominated by legacy media like newspapers and broadcasters. New journalistic ventures, such as Netzeitung, Rue89 and Il Post, are competing not only with other startups but also with the popular online offerings of news organizations like Spiegel, Le Monde and La Reppublica. These incumbents, and others like them, have built their digital strategy around their well-known brands and content from their existing newsrooms. They fund them with profits from their (generally declining) offline operations. Together with a handful of aggregators and portals, such legacy players dominate online news provision in most European countries.

Romantic comedy “Think Like a Man” easily beat four new films to win the U.S. and Canadian box office race for a second time while superhero movie “The Avengers” stormed into overseas theaters with record-breaking sales.

“Think Like a Man” led domestic charts with an $18.0 million total from Friday through Sunday, according to studio estimates compiled by Reuters on Sunday. New movies including adult comedy “The Five-Year Engagement” didn’t come close, each grabbing about $11 million or less. 

Big-budget, effects-filled “Avengers” hauled in a massive $178.4 million since Wednesday from theaters in 39 international markets, Walt Disney Co said. The 3D film from Disney’s Marvel studio set opening-weekend records in 12 territories including Mexico and Brazil and opening-day records in four countries.  

Just how long can Apple run the table in the post-Jobs era? It was simply a matter of time before those whispers turned into a question asked out loud. George Colony, the CEO of Forrester, a research and advisory firm that has followed the company as closely as anyone, is taking a particularly dim view of Apple’s future. In a blog post that was guaranteed to spark a conversation, Colony says Apple’s days as a market leader are numbered; its “momentum will carry it for 24-48 months” and then, absent a “charismatic leader” in the Jobs mold, it will devolve from “being a great company to being a good company.”

Colony doesn’t get too specific about what this means, but we know. It’s not just about market cap, or stock price or any other shareholder metric. Colony is talking about that combination of imagination and execution pixie dust that has made Apple the most significant high-tech company of the moment, and one of the most important ever.

It’s a pretty big statement, especially since Apple is on fire: $6 billion earned on $40 billion in revenues in the most recent quarter, the iPhone selling as briskly in the rest of the world now as it did in the United States for years, 65 million iPads sold in two years, more cash than it knows what to do with, and at least one analyst speculating that it’ll be a $1,000 stock before long.

Reaching people through mobile devices is one of LinkedIn’s key initiatives and yet, the networking site for job-seeking professionals never had a proper app for tablets.

 The number of LinkedIn members — all 150 million of them — who use mobile phones to access the site is growing at a fast clip. In Q1, LinkedIn  said that 22 percent of its traffic came from mobile devices, up from 15 percent in Q4 2011.

On Wednesday, LinkedIn finally rolled out an app for  iPads hoping to get more people to linger at the site longer.

Klout, the service that claims to measure social media “influence,” released its first mobile app on Wednesday, promising a way for social media users to leverage their online personas for real-life perks.

Klout, one of the better known startups that have sprouted from Twitter’s ecosystem, is founded upon the intriguing, but often-contested, premise that a person’s online clout could be quantified and boiled down to a single number — a number that, in an world increasingly engaged and intertwined with social media, mirrors flesh-and-blood influence.

Among other things, Klout’s complex algorithm takes into consideration the frequency and probability of re-Tweets and Facebook and Google Plus shares to assign users a score between 1 and 100. The algorithm also measures which topics a user is influential in, a feature that offers brands insight into which power users to woo, and of course, what they are saying about products.

Pinterest has yet to provide many details about how it intends to make money from its fast-growing image-sharing social service.

But that’s not stopping others from trying to capitalize on the online service’s rich catalog of product images.

Copious, a social commerce start-up, launched a new version of its website on Monday that lets consumers buy many of the bags, shoes and other fashion accessories that get shared by Pinterest’s millions of users every day.

 The box office competition finally overwhelmed “The Hunger Games” as the romantic comedy “Think Like a Man” beat expectations with a chart-topping $33.0 million in U.S. and Canadian ticket sales over the weekend. 

Love story “The Lucky One” also exceeded forecasts to finish second with $22.8 million from Friday through Sunday, according to studio estimates. The two films pushed the blockbuster “Hunger Games” to third, ending its four-week streak at No. 1. 

“Think Like a Man” is based on comedian Steve Harvey’s best-selling, non-fiction relationship guide “Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man.”  

A Kickstarter project for a device you wear on your wrist, but that needs a smartphone to do anything really interesting, has raised more than $5.3 million in eight days. This is this far and away the most anyone has ever raised on Kickstarter, and it’s happening – with a gadget in a category that has a pretty dismal track record – at a sales pace that would make even Apple sit up and take notice.

Mind you, Pebble, “The E-Paper Watch” looks very snazzy. At $115 (only 200 were available for $99, and it will retail for $150 when it goes on proper sale) it’s not terribly expensive. And there is a bit of the Kickstarter effect for things that get lots of favorable press: It’s great to get an insider deal and to get in on the ground floor on something cool. And to risk nothing: If the entrepreneur’s funding requirement isn’t met, you don’t get charged a penny.

Within two hours the people behind Pebble got what they asked for: a measly $100,000. By the time the funding round closes on May 19, they’re on pace to have more than $30 million in orders.

Forget Instagram’s billion-dollar payday. Forget IPOs, past and future, from Facebook, Groupon, LinkedIn and the like. And ignore, please, the online ramblings of attention-hungry venture capitalists and narcissistic Silicon Valley journalists with the off-putting habit of making their inside-baseball sound like the World Series. Their stories, to paraphrase Shakespeare, are tales told by idiots, full of sound and fury, but signifying very little about the impact of technology on most of our lives. (Sure, some of their tales are about great fortunes, but those are only for a select few; to summon the Oracle of Omaha rather than the Bard of Avon, only a fool ever equated price with value.) Their one-in-a-million windfalls are just flashes in the pan. Or, actually, they are solitary data points, meaningless when devoid of context.

That context is here. It’s come, in part, because of the cunningly simple social and curatorial tools that media companies like Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook and Pinterest give away to their users. But making sense of our social world is only possible with the the tools and technology behind what we call Big Data. The massive information collections spawned by our digital world are too big to address directly, so smart scientists have used fast computers to carve the data into real knowledge. This is how Big Data is already changing the way the world works.

But Big Data is young; though there are hundreds of accessible data sets already, there are still many more chaotic stores of information its tools can tame. Take, for example, social media: Yesterday, social media API company Gnip announced that it is providing customers with all of Tumblr’s data, what in techspeak is called the firehose. What Gnip and competitors like DataSift are providing to customers are Social Big Data firehoses that can be perfectly filtered into gently babbling brooks lined with digital gold nuggets. When the tech media wonder out loud how social companies will ever make a buck – sifting the gold out of their user-generated content is a huge piece of the puzzle.