Evernote's Big iOS Update Includes Rich-Text Editing, Gets Thumbs up from Chris Pirillo

Evernote, which allows users to save and search their notes across devices, has updated its iPhone and iPad apps to support rich text (see above), shared notebooks, password locks and more, in addition to a Lion-specific Mac update. Evernote first released an iPad app in April 2010.

"The update is simply incremental -- further entrenching Evernote as the definitive note-taking application," Evernote user and technology strategist Chris Pirillo tells LAUNCH via email. "The redesign was overdue, as is the case for most applications which have evolved over time. Perhaps now my dad will...

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New YouTube Partner Ranking Reveals Music Sites Crushing It with Over Half of Unique Viewers in July

Google's YouTube continued to dominate the online video market in July with 88% of unique viewers in the U.S. -- or 158M -- according to comScore. But comScore is now tracking which YouTube partners are most popular, and music is the clear winner: VEVO music video channel (59.7M) and Warner Music (31.3M) together accounted for well over half of all YouTube viewers in July followed by the video gamer network Machinima (16.9M) and Demand Media (15.2M).

For this first report, comScore only tracked those YouTube partners that agreed to be part of the trial -- and not all did, AdAge reported. However, the top three channels would...

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Lockerz Just Raised $36M--We Find out What Really Happens on the Social Commerce Site

Lockerz, whose users get redeemable "points" for things like uploading photos and watching online videos, recently raised a $36M C round led by DAG Ventures that included previous investors Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Liberty Media Corporation. Live-entertainment company Live Nation made a strategic investment.

Founded by former American Eagle and Amazon executive Kathy Savitt, the Seattle-based company expects to close the round at $45M by early October. In January, Lockerz acquired photo-sharing site Plixi and its more than 1B photo uploads a month.  

“Our investors in general recognize the potential of Lockerz’ vision for creating a platform that rewards social expression, and eventually becoming the homepage for Generation Z,” a Lockerz spokesperson told LAUNCH [ Kathy was not available for comment ]. Lockerz defines Generation Z as 13 to 30-year-olds.

But what is actually happening on Lockerz, which claims 45M members? We decided to look beyond the press releases and found that...

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Measure Heart Rate through Your Skin with the Tiny Pulse Sensor

WHAT: A low-cost, open source sensor that measures your heart rate through your skin [ production sample shown above ]. Students, artists, athletes and game and mobile developers can use the Pulse Sensor to incorporate live heart-rate data into their projects. Its button-sized holes make it easy to sew into clothing, and it can be clipped onto a finger or earlobe. The Pulse Sensor also comes with software to graph data in real time. Designed to be used with Arduino, hardware that can process data.

Project on Kickstarter has raised $14K (original goal was $3K). [ see our profile of the Kogeto Dot, another Kickstarter success story. ]

LAUNCHERS:  Joel Murphy and Yury Gitman, physical computing teachers at Parsons The New School for Design. Joel is the founder of Rachel's Electronics, an online store for electronics kits and breakout boards. Yury is the founder of the Banana Design Lab, which manufactures (in limited runs) and sells quirky high-tech products.

WHEN/WHERE:  Aug. 11 [ production sample ] / New York.

BACKSTORY: Joel and Yury teach students how to incorporate electronics and hardware, specifically with Arduino. Though they haven't assigned making an optical heart-rate monitor to their classes yet, each year a few students...

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Condé Nast's Reddit Still Filled with Rape, Nudity and Dead Babies

Reddit, an online platform owned by Condé Nast, continues to be flooded with threads dedicated to dead babies, rape and violence, despite earlier reports of excessive controversial content on the site.

Some of the subreddits in question include /r/picsofdeadkids  and /r/beatingwomen.

Condé Nast, which acquired Reddit back in 2006, publishes leading magazines including Wired, The New Yorker and Vogue.

In regards to the subreddit /r/picsofdeadkids, "That's obviously a reddit that is very offensive to a lot of people and those images are...

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