As an upfront warning, this post contains several educated guesses. They will be marked as such. We don’t have all the information we would like to have, but this is what we’ve manged to dig up. To begin, we reported in the middle of December that Microsoft was putting together amassive patent consortiumthat included plans to buy $450 million in patents from Novell, who was in the process of being acquired by Attachmate....

A new site has launched that shakes up the way Twitter works, by filtering out the noisiest tweeters to give you a newly customised feed. TheShuu.shapp, currently in beta, is incredibly easy to use and completely changes the Twitter experience. Shuu.sh works as a web-based Twitter client and you can choose whether to filter the tweets by simply switching on or off. It’s been launched by Berg, a design consultancy based in London, which explains why the site looks so nice and is yet another good example of what can be done with Twitter when developers get their hands on the API and offer a completely new experience to the microblogging site....

People who create concept designs for future technology always have the luxury that their ideas don’t have to be practical or possible now, just cool enough to get people excited about what might be created one day. Rimino, a project by Amid Moradganjeh from the Umeå Institute of Design at Umeå University in Sweden, is a look at what mobile phones might become in the future. Noting that mobile operating systems have become increasingly complicated in recent years, this is an attempt to simplify everything down into an e-paper-based mobile device with a user interface inspired by print posters....

If you live and die by your music collection, you understand how horrible it would be to lose half of your precious tracks. That recently happened to me. After nearly a dozen attempts to restore my full library of tunes from Mozy, I had to accept that fact that half were never coming down from the cloud. Yes, I did cancel my Mozy subscription over the matter. Still, I was resolute to not be beaten down by luck, and I instead decided to try a subscription service to replace all my lost music....

Last week, the Brazilian angelPierre Schürmannhad a meeting with an early-stage startup. Its claimed valuation according to its pitch deck? US$18 million. Its current revenue? Zero. This anecdote is only one example of the gap between entrepreneurs’ expectations and investors’ estimates that some VCs have started to complain about. So should we worry about inflated startup valuations in Brazil? A call for “valuation sanity” AlthoughTed Rogersis American, he has a deep knowledge of the Brazilian startup ecosystem....