The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- Teens In Tech Acquires Microblogging Site Yazzem; Rolls Out Redesign
- Skyfire For Symbian Brought Up To Speed
- gWallet Launches Early-Stage Venture Fund To Invest In Social Gaming Startups
- Study: Internet Radio Reaching 32% of Households, Ereaders Are Hot, Newspapers are Doomed
- Dropbox Announces 4 Million Users, Hires A VP From Salesforce
- iSites Will Let Publishers Simultaneously Build Apps For iPhone And Android
- Pegshot Puts Your Video Message On A Map
- The New York Times Announces Paid Content Plans For 2011
- ViVu Launches Video Collaboration Plug-In For Skype
- Anticipating the Apple Tablet: When journalism becomes fanfiction
- Hey Look, It’s The Twitter Fail Whale!
- Amazon To Introduce New 70% Royalty Option For Kinde Digital Text Platform
- Facebook Valued At $14 Billion On SecondMarket
- Watch Obama’s State Of The Union Speech Live From Your iPhone Next Week
- India’s SMS GupShup Raises $12 Million For Twitter-Like Social Network
- Ooyala To Power All Video Content For The Telegraph Media Group
- Opera Buys Mobile Ad Startup AdMarvel For $8M In Cash Plus A $15M Earnout
- Facebook Beacon Done Right? Retailers Start Embracing Blippy.
- Bing Maps Adds Two New Silverlight Apps For Events And Customized Directions
- SlideScreen for Android Borders On Information Overload (In A Good Way)
- It Looks Like Loic Is Getting Ready To Launch Seesmic Look
- Bill Gates Rejoins Facebook, Gives Twitter A Try Too
- Foursquare Checks-In A General Manager: Former Bebo VP Evan Cohen
- Why In The Name Of All That Is Wonderful Would You Want A Tablet With A 5″ Screen?
- Microsoft To Emergency Patch IE As The Web Gathers With Pitchforks Around IE6
| Teens In Tech Acquires Microblogging Site Yazzem; Rolls Out Redesign Posted: 20 Jan 2010 09:04 AM PST Even teens are getting into M&A. Teens in Tech, a blogging network founded by 17 year old Daniel Brusilovsky, has acquired Yazzem, a Twitter-like microblogging network that allows you to post short thoughts organized by topic to its site, Twitter and FriendFeed simultaneously. Yazzem, which was founded by 14 year olds Zachary Collins and Dustin Snider, was acquired for $15,000. It’s not a huge deal, but these are teenagers, after all. Disclosure: Brusilovsky writes for TechCrunch and he covered Yazzem before buying them. His business relationship with Yazzem’s founders developed after the initial post, which is why we are disclosing it now. Teens in Tech, which currently features content from 700 bloggers, is meant to offer teenagers a simple way to blog their thoughts in an atmosphere that is both safe and receptive to their ideas. Teens can upload audio, video, pictures and text to the platform. The site launched back in August in a private alpha and today is opening up to the public. The site is also launching a new version and redesign later today which will include featured content on its homepage, suggested users and more. The most significant change in the new version of the site is advertising. Bloggers can also collect money from advertising if they choose to turn the ad feature on their blog. Brusilovsky says that the startup is also going to soon roll out premium features, where users will have to pay for more storage, custom CSS and more. Brusilovsky hopes the acquisition of Yazzem represents a way to transform Teens in Tech to more than just a youth-oriented blogging platform in an effort to appeal to a broader demographic than teens. Yazzem’s technology will be become a product of Teens in Tech and its founders will join the teen blogging network. This isn’t the first acquisition for Teens In Tech; the startup snapped up fellow teen blogging site Youth Blogging Network last March. Brusilovsky expects for users to increase more rapidly now that the site is open but it is unclear whether the acquisition of Yazzem will be able to attract older bloggers to Teens in Tech. The network is a laudable effort; especially considering the age of its founder. Teens in Tech even has a conference business. The startup is hosting its second annual Teens in Tech Conference on February 6 at Google's San Francisco office. Speakers will include Facebook developer Joe Hewitt, Twitter product designer 
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| Skyfire For Symbian Brought Up To Speed Posted: 20 Jan 2010 09:02 AM PST Between UI enhancements, bug fixes, and neat new features like smooth scrolling, Skyfire has been slamming out the updates as of late — but only for one platform. While the Flash/Silverlight-capable mobile browser is available for both Windows Mobile and Symbian, the latter edition hasn’t seen any updates in months… until today. Read the rest of this entry at MobileCrunch >>
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| gWallet Launches Early-Stage Venture Fund To Invest In Social Gaming Startups Posted: 20 Jan 2010 08:54 AM PST Virtual currency monetization platform gWallet is announcing a new early-stage venture fund, gWallet Ventures, to invest in social gaming companies and promote innovation within the social gaming ecosystem. gWallet, which recently raised $10 million in funding, has already begun searching for investment opportunities in gaming developers on Facebook and MySpace, as well as smaller social gaming companies that are looking to bring their games to the masses. Investments will range from $100,000 to $1 million per company. Of course the investment is also tied with adopting the monetization opportunities that gWallet can provide for publishers. Chahal says the investment fund was formed with excess funds from its recent round of funding. Founded by serial entrepreneur Gurbaksh Chahal, gWallet works directly with brands directly as opposed to adopting an affiliate leads model and uses branded video campaigns to engage with consumers. Disney, Best Buy, K-Mart, Nestle, Coke, and The History Channel are all using gWallet's video campaigns on social networks, which are powered by Tube Mogul. gWallet contends that video content is drawing visitors to review and complete more offers. In one week, gWallet reports that its campaigns received over 480,000 views and over 1 million minutes of total viewing time with user engagement averaging more than 2 minutes per video campaign. Publishers that deployed gWallet videos noted that revenue increased up to 600 percent.
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| Study: Internet Radio Reaching 32% of Households, Ereaders Are Hot, Newspapers are Doomed Posted: 20 Jan 2010 07:40 AM PST  L.E.K.'s Media Consumption Survey polled over 2,000 consumers, asking them about their general media "diet," from ereaders to online video. The results? Ereaders are big, older folks are into the Internet, and online radio is finally reaching the mainstream. Most of this isn't huge news but the statistics are pretty striking. For example:
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| Dropbox Announces 4 Million Users, Hires A VP From Salesforce Posted: 20 Jan 2010 07:36 AM PST
Dropbox was founded by CEO Drew Houston and CTO Arash Ferdowsi in 2007, and received seed funding from Y Combinator soon after. The company went on to raise $7.2 million from Sequoia Capital and Accel Partners. Dropbox enables people to sync files and media across platforms and devices, in order to have them available from any location. The service also allows people to easily and quickly share files with others. Dropbox provides users with 2 GB of space for free (twice the storage Google offers), with add-on plans offering more storage and functionality for a fee. The company is also announcing today that Adam Gross has joined the company as Senior Vice President, Marketing and Sales. Gross spent the past seven years at Salesforce.com as Vice President of Platform and Developer Marketing, where he helped grow the company from early-stage to over $1b in revenue. During his tenure, Gross launched Salesforce.com’s Web services API and the Force.com platform-as-a-service.
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| iSites Will Let Publishers Simultaneously Build Apps For iPhone And Android Posted: 20 Jan 2010 07:00 AM PST
Of course, you’re not going to be able to build out a particularly complex app in ten minutes, but if your primary goal is to syndicate your stories to users, with basic features like browsing by categories and the ability to ‘favorite’ stories, this will suit you just fine. Building an app is straightforward: first, you tell iSites which RSS feed it should include in your app. You can also include feeds from a dozen popular web services like Twitter, Blogger, Flickr, and Wordpress. Once you’ve figured out what content you’re going to include, you can tweak the color scheme of the app, add your own logos, and attach an icon and a description to include in the App Store. Once all that’s done, you submit the app and wait for it to appear on the App Store (iSites handles the submission process). Once the app is live, you can log in to your iSites account to view analytics on the app’s performance, including which content in your app is the most popular. One of the nice things about iSites is that even after you’ve deployed your app, you can modify the various feeds the app is pulling content from. And soon, you’ll be able to deploy apps to both the App Store and Android Market (the Android version is currently in Beta testing, with release planned in the next few weeks). Changes made using iSites (like your app’s layout or feeds) will be reflected on both your iPhone and Android apps. iSites costs users a flat fee of $25 for the standard version, or $99 a year if you want to be able to include your own AdMob ads. The service is currently being used by a number of clients, including university papers like The Daily Californian, The Stanford Daily, and The State Press. iSites certainly isn’t the first player to offer a solution for helping publishers build mobile apps — we’ve been seeing similar tools for nearly as long as the App Store has been around, with competitors including AppMakr, Mobile Roadie, and plenty more. 
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| Pegshot Puts Your Video Message On A Map Posted: 20 Jan 2010 06:32 AM PST Sometimes you want to show people where you are and what you are doing, not just tell them. One geo app that lets you do that with photos and videos is Pegshot, which operates both as a Website and a complementary iPhone app (iTunes link). Pegshot lets you capture a video clip or photo on your iPhone and send it out as a message via a link on Twitter or Facebook. When one of your friends clicks on the link, they are taken to a page on Pegshot where they can watch the video, or see the photo, next to a map showing where it was taken. There they can add a comment to the shot. For example, here is a Pegshot that founder Phil Thomas DiGiulio sent me as an introduction to the service. On the page, you can see the video message, the map, and his recent stream of shots. You can also sign up for your own account and start following other users. PegShot lets you both follow other people like on Twitter and friend them like on Facebook, which requires a reciprocal two-way acknowledgement. Within the iPhone app, whenever you take a Pegshot, you have the option to share with just with your Pegshot friends, people on Twitter, Facebook, or all three services. You take the shot, title it, and say where you are (you can pick from a list of nearby locations like you can on Foursquare or add your own). It is also easy to email a Pegshot link from the app. I expect many of the elements of Pegshot to be adopted by other geo apps. It ties together the video messages, the maps, and the stream in an elegant way. But there are some drawbacks. You cannot use your Facebook or Twitter ID to sign in or import your existing friends from those services. It only lets you broadcast out to those services. And while the iPhone app makes it easy to take a shot and upload it, it doesn’t act as a stream reader itself. So you can’t use it to check out other people’s shots once you do start to follow people. To do that you have to be on a regular computer. Those two features would be pretty simple to add in future upgrades. As more and more mobile apps become Geo-enabled, we are going to see a lot more of this kind of Geo-stream interface mixing maps, videos, and status updates.
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| The New York Times Announces Paid Content Plans For 2011 Posted: 20 Jan 2010 06:21 AM PST
The publisher will offer users free access to an unspecified set number of articles per month and then charge users once they exceed that number. The New York Times says this will enable NYTimes.com to create a second revenue stream while still preserving its advertising business, for which digital now makes up about a quarter of its total advertising revenues. In addition, the company says, it will also provide the “necessary flexibility to keep an appropriate ratio between free and paid content and stay connected to a search-driven Web”. Through 2010, NYT will be building a new online infrastructure designed to provide consumers with a good user experience across multiple platforms. Once the metered model is implemented, New York Times home delivery print subscribers will continue to have free access to NYTimes.com. "Our new business model is designed to provide additional support for The New York Times' extraordinary, professional journalism," said Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., chairman of The New York Times Company and publisher of The New York Times. "Our audiences are very loyal and we believe that our readers will pay for our award-winning digital content and services." It remains to be seen if that will be the case. The company said more details regarding the metered model will be available in the coming months. Check out NYT reporter Richard Pérez-Peña’s take on his employer’s plans here. Last weekend, New York Magazine reported that the New York Times Company was close to announcing that the paper will begin charging for access to its website. They were right, and also about the fact that it would likely be a metered model like the Financial Times rather than a pay wall type offering like the Wall Street Journal (cough). Evidently, it’s hard not to see this announcement in light of Apple’s upcoming event, where the company is set to unveil its new tablet computer and a slew of content partnerships with major publishers, likely including the New York Times. What do you think about the NYT’s plans to start charging for access to its website articles? Do you think they made the right decision in turning to the metered model rather than a traditional pay wall or micro-payments based approach?
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| ViVu Launches Video Collaboration Plug-In For Skype Posted: 20 Jan 2010 05:55 AM PST  ViVu, an online video conferencing platform, has launched an easy to use plug-in that enables multi-user video conferencing on Skype (which has over 521 million users). Called VuRoom, the plug-in allows users to video conference, share presentations and their desktops and more with large groups. ViVu's "video as a service" lets anyone create a live video webcast that can be used for online meetings and events, sales presentations, demos or training sessions. ViVu's cloud-based technology can be enabled via a PC, Mac or smartphone and provides an auditorium like-view within the browser making it ideal for large conferences or meetings. Once VuRoom is downloaded, the host simply selects the Skype contacts they want to join the conference and calls the entire group. The participant joins clicking the URL provided in their text chat window. Call participants, other than the host, need not have the ViVu plug-in installed to participate in the video conference. During the call, the presenter and participants can share their presentations and desktop to other participants. VuRoom, which costs $9.95 per month, is affordable not only because of the modest price tag, but also because participants don’t have to buy the plug-in to use it. The startup, which recently raised $3 million in funding, faces competition from TokBox and Tinychat.
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| Anticipating the Apple Tablet: When journalism becomes fanfiction Posted: 20 Jan 2010 04:20 AM PST
And yet – my God – I’m bored of reading about Apple and their ‘long awaited’ tablet. Like most people who are broadly interested in technology, I set aside part of each day to catch up with the latest tech stories. Usually, out of loyalty and contractual obligation, I begin with TechCrunch, before moving on to Techmeme for a round-up of everything that my esteemed colleagues here might have missed. Between those two hubs, and the links I find on the latter, I can usually get a broad overview of what’s developing, what’s launching and – generally speaking – what’s important. But not tonight. Tonight no fewer than seven of the ten most recent stories on Techmeme concern Apple. “Apple calling tablet the iTablet?” asks the first headline, from Boy Genius Report. “'Minor issues' could delay $999 Apple tablet availability ’til June – report” says the second, from AppleInsider. Then there’s more speculation on the name of the tablet from MacRumors, a Business Week story about Bing – maybe – becoming the default search service on the iPhone; a guest post from TechCrunch about ‘Apple’s secret cloud strategy‘ – and so on and so on, ad infinitum, ad nauseum. Of course, the front page of Techmeme isn’t the whole Internet – it’s just an algorithm backed up by a team of human editors. Perhaps they’re just having an Apple day. So I head for my go-to source of non-Valley-centric technology news: Rory Cellan-Jones’ blog at the BBC. Rory is based on London and so can usually be relied on to give a glimpse outside of the bubble. But not tonight. “Is publishing about to have an iPod moment?” he asks, before going on to speculate whether Apple’s new tablet will do for books what the iPod did for recorded music (Spoiler alert: he thinks not). And my erstwhile colleagues at the Guardian? Top technology story: “Apple looks for UK mobile partner for new tablet” Related story: “Apple confirms date for its ‘event’”. Its event being, of course, the launch of the tablet. On every tech news site the story is the same. Apple, Apple, Apple: most of it reams of gushing speculation over the alleged tablet that the company is allegedly launching a week from today. And when they run out of things to speculate about, these professional journalists simply turn to writing about having received their invitation to the launch event, with its paint-splattered jpeg and its mysterious – by which I mean not mysterious at all – caption "Come see our latest creation." Damon Darlin at the New York Times even wrote a post rounding up everyone else’s post about the invitation. Enough. Seriously, enough. I get that an Apple tablet is big news. I agree with those who say that Apple’s product launches deserve more attention than those from other companies as their products tend to be ‘game-changers’. I, along with most other avowed Mac fans, will be tuning in to the webcast of the launch announcement, and – despite my cynicism over its threat to the Kindle – there’s at least a slim possibility that I’ll buy whatever it is that Apple wants to sell me. But until the official launch announcement comes, I would rather not hear another word about Apple and their tablet. Not because it isn’t news – but because so many of the journalists anticipating the launch have dropped any sense of responsibility to their readers and replaced it with cloying fanboyism. They claim of course that they’re digging for facts – the name of the new product, its price point, its specs – because that’s what reporters do. Bullshit. What reporters do is find out things that people don’t want us to know. In seven days’ time Apple is going to announce the name of their product, its price, its specs and much more besides. Revealing those things seven days early isn’t news. At best it’s attention seeking: every blogger and his dog wants to be able to say “I knew it was going to be called the iWhateverthehell before you did”. It’s the same look-at-me motive that caused them to post their launch invitations online, like they’re received one of Willy Wonka’s golden tickets or a day pass to fucking Narnia. At worst it’s a bizarre form of fan fiction: gaggles of tech hacks who never fully left the schoolyard, scribbling out their own personal Steve Job fantasies for the approbation of their peers. “What will he announce? What will it look like? What would it be like if he had sex with Woz?” What it most certainly isn’t is a service to readers. The vast majority of people who follow technology news – even those of us who are die-hard Mac fans – are perfectly able to wait seven days until the formal announcement, not least because we know that once the new Apple tablet hits the streets we’re going to be absolutely swamped with comment and analysis at the cost of any other kind of tech reporting for at least two weeks. Knowing the tsunami of hype that’s coming, any journalist who truly wanted to serve his readers would have the good grace to shut the hell up about Apple for a week and concentrate on breaking some real news while there’s still time. So what do you say, tech hacks? A seven day quiet period? A whole week spent reporting actual news that will almost certainly be drowned out the moment Steve Jobs takes to the stage? Seven days where you stop acting like kids at school who can’t focus on their algebra because they know the Christmas holidays are only a week away? Seven days of shhhhhh before the inevitable orgy of journalistic seed-spilling over the wipe-clean screen of Apple’s latest miracle? Six days? Three? An hour?
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| Hey Look, It’s The Twitter Fail Whale! Posted: 20 Jan 2010 03:55 AM PST Just yesterday I wrote about a new service called API-Status.com that monitors the availability of 26 popular APIs, and today it’s already proven useful for me. The Twitter API is down, causing thousands of third-party apps and services to malfunction. Of course, a simple visit to Twitter.com would also teach you that the service is broken, because as of approximately 6:40AM Eastern Time people are unable to access the site because of ‘too many tweets’. In other words: welcome back, fail whale. Update (7:45 AM EST): it’s back up for me. For what it’s worth, according to Pingdom Twitter was having a nice run this month, with a registered uptime of 99.89% in January 2010 so far. I’m thinking Bill Gates could have something to do with it. At this moment, there isn’t any mention of the service disruption on the Twitter Status site yet, so we’re left wondering when the service is expected to come back up. In the meantime, go check out our 15 alternative things to do when Twitter is down post. Update: at 7:25AM EST, Twitter updated its status blog:
(As commenters are pointing out, the news that a second earthquake just hit Haiti likely resulted in a flurry of tweets and retweets about the subject, and Twitter may not have been able to handle that sudden load.) And don’t forget to retweet this post. You know, later.
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| Amazon To Introduce New 70% Royalty Option For Kinde Digital Text Platform Posted: 20 Jan 2010 03:27 AM PST
For each Kindle book sold, authors and publishers who choose the new royalty option – will will not replace the existing DTP standard royalty option – will receive 70 percent of list price, net of delivery costs. Amazon says the new 70 percent royalty option will become available on June 30, 2010 and be restricted to books sold in the United States at launch. From the press release:
Russ Grandinetti, Vice President of Kindle Content at Amazon.com says authors today often receive royalties in the range of 7% to 15% of the list price that publishers set for their physical books, or 25% of the net that publishers receive from retailers for their digital books. The new royalty option aims to increase the revenue earned from book sales for publishers and authors, but there are certain requirements they have to meet in order to qualify, on top of the requirements books receiving the standard royalty rate have today: - The author or publisher-supplied list price must be between $2.99 and $9.99 For the latter requirement, Amazon says it will provide tools to automate the process, and that the 70 percent royalty will be calculated off the sales price.
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| Facebook Valued At $14 Billion On SecondMarket Posted: 20 Jan 2010 02:09 AM PST
The last time we checked in, in December 2009, private sales were occurring at $25 per share, or a $11 billion valuation. This new $32/share bid price doesn’t represent an actual sale, though. There are currently 20,000 shares of common stock for sale with an asking price of $40 per share (or a $17.6 billion valuation). But it does show that someone out there is willing to buy those 20,000 shares for $32/each. So far, the seller hasn’t bitten. It was only a few months ago that employees and other common stockholders sold $100 million of their stock to DST at just a $6.5 billion valuation. That sale was oversubscribed and some stockholders weren’t able to sell. With the benefit of hindsight, they were the lucky ones. If a sale occurs at $32 it will be the closest the company has come to its $15 billion valuation that Microsoft paid way back in late 2007. In May 2009, DST purchased $200 million in Facebook preferred stock at a $10 billion valuation. Confused? It’s not that complicated. Employees and advisors get common stock, which trades at a lower valuation. Venture capitalists buy preferred stock which has additional rights and privileges attached to it (particularly a liquidity preference, which lets those venture capitalists get their money back before the common shareholders get their share). But when Facebook goes public, all preferred stock will likely convert into common stock at a 1:1 ratio, and those additional rights are stripped away. Most of the difference in valuation is just due to complicated tax rules which let startups give employees low priced, tax advantaged stock options to incentivize them to join the company before it goes public.
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| Watch Obama’s State Of The Union Speech Live From Your iPhone Next Week Posted: 20 Jan 2010 02:08 AM PST
The application comes packed with content, including the latest news items, videos, photos and blog posts from The White House. One feature that stands out is live video streaming, which enables iPhone and iPod Touch owners to watch the President's public events at the White House as well as other events like key speeches and press briefings in real-time. Next week, U.S. President Barack Obama will address the nation, and his State Of The Union speech will be broadcast live both from the White House website right here and from the iPhone application. One thing: check the name of the app to make sure you download the official one when you search from your phone. Hint: it’s the one you don’t have to pay for. In the coming weeks, the White House says it will also launch a mobile website at mobile.WhiteHouse.gov, which will be optimized for any internet-enabled mobile device. Screenshots of the iPhone app:
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| India’s SMS GupShup Raises $12 Million For Twitter-Like Social Network Posted: 20 Jan 2010 01:50 AM PST SMS GupShup, a Twitter-like service in India that is primarily accessed via SMS, has raised $12 million in funding led by Globespan Capital Partners with existing investors Charles River Ventures and Helion Venture Partners participating in the round. The latest capital injection brings SMS GupShup’s total funding to $37 million. Launched in April 2007, SMS GupShup (spawned from Webaroo) serves 26 million users across India. The startup has seen rapid growth in users primarily due to the immense popularity of mobile devices in India. According to the startup, there are 550 million mobile phone users in the country and only 50 million web users. With a 10 to 1 mobile-to-PC ratio and SMS serving as the most popular communications platform, the market is ripe for SMS GupShup to take off. SMS GupShup currently processes over 480 million messages a month and accounts for 5 percent of all texts sent within India. The new funding will be used for expand into other markets such as the Philippines and Indonesia, for product development and to hire new staff in engineering, advertising and marketing. In fact, the mobile social network has even attracted the attention of leaders in the space, like Facebook. Last year, Facebook partnered with SMS GupShup to powere and deliver its users’ status updates via text messages. And besides partnerships, SMS GupShup also has an advertising strategy. Over 100 advertisers currently run on the network including local insurance provider ICICI Lombard and international brands like Puma, Microsoft and Cadbury. India is a huge market for social networks, with Facebook, Orkut and even Twitter vying for a share of the growing number of web users who are increasingly flocking to social networks in their day-to-day routines. But clearly, SMS GupShup has tapped into the mobile side of social networks and is seeing success from this in India. It should be interesting to see how SMS GupShup will fare in other countries. It seems that in developing countries where mobile phone usage is much highers than web-usage the service is sure to take off. But the question remains if the service could ever take off in Europe or the U.S., which seems to be Twitter territory.
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| Ooyala To Power All Video Content For The Telegraph Media Group Posted: 20 Jan 2010 01:47 AM PST  Ooyala, a US-based provider of video platform applications and services, and Telegraph Media Group (TMG) are today announcing that they have signed an agreement for Ooyala to power online video on the publisher's websites, which includes news site Telegraph.co.uk. In addition, Ooyala and TMG's "Euston Project" team will co-develop new technologies to improve the way information is delivered and consumed online.
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| Opera Buys Mobile Ad Startup AdMarvel For $8M In Cash Plus A $15M Earnout Posted: 20 Jan 2010 01:16 AM PST
Opera is buying the startup for approx. $8 million in cash plus a $15 million earnout, which will be paid in cash only if “certain aggressive financial targets” are met over the next 24 months, TechCrunch has learned. AdMarvel, founded in 2006, enables publishers and operators to source, manage and track advertising from virtually any ad network. The company works with a wide range of mobile publishers, developers, carriers, ad networks, agencies and advertisers to optimize advertising inventory and revenue. Its services work across mobile web, WAP, SMS and in-application modalities. Formerly named Frengo, the startup was founded by CEO Mahi de Silva (ex-VeriSign and Apple) and a number of other former VeriSign executives. According to our records in CrunchBase, Frengo raised a total of $8 million over the years from investors like Index Ventures, Khosla Ventures and Trilogy Equity Partnership. "In our fast-growing industry, mobile advertising represents an interesting long-term revenue opportunity. Every month, nearly 50 million people access the Web using Opera on their mobile phones and together with AdMarvel, we think we can play an important role in the evolution of mobile advertising," says Lars Boilesen, who was recently promoted to Chief Executive Officer at Opera. Opera says that the acquisition of AdMarvel will enable it to expand its portfolio of products and services to include ad monetization services for Opera-branded mobile products offered by operators and content partners. This is the latest in a series of acquisitions in the mobile advertising space, although this is a minor one in comparison to Google’s purchase of AdMob ($750 million) and Apple’s acquisition of Quattro Wireless ($275 million).
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| Facebook Beacon Done Right? Retailers Start Embracing Blippy. Posted: 19 Jan 2010 09:59 PM PST
Blipply has reached agreements with three partners to promote and use Blippy on their sites: Woot, Groupon, and Overstock.com. The latter is particularly interesting because as you may remember, Overstock.com was an initial Facebook Beacon partner — something which caused some controversy, and caused the company to pull away from Beacon. Now, they appear ready to revisit the idea. Not that Beacon and Blippy are exactly the same. Beacon’s main problem was that it was opt-out rather than opt-in, which Blippy, as a service, is. But both at their core involve the sharing of purchasing data. And clearly from the get-go this has been an idea that intrigues retailers. After all, people sharing what they’re actually buying should pique the interests of others that may do the same. That was why many of them bought into the idea of Beacon. But Facebook users felt they were being tricked into sharing this data, and worse, giving it over to Facebook to use for advertising purposes. Blippy, which makes it very clear that the sharing of this data is whole idea of the service, gives these retailers an outlet to perhaps do it right this time. The amount each service will use Blippy varies. Some simply have a link telling users they can share their data on the service. Others are using OAuth to actually send purchasing data over to Blippy. How exactly Overstock.com will use Blippy is still being discussed, and should be in place by the end of the week, we’re told. But Woot and Groupon integration has already been finalized and should be live shortly. Depsite its controversial idea, Blippy has seem some great initial traction among users. And they’ve been able to attract a choice group of investors. This interaction between users and retailers on Blippy may be the key to the future of the service. And if it goes over well, it may leave Facebook kicking itself for what might have been. [photo: flickr/ken dyck]
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| Bing Maps Adds Two New Silverlight Apps For Events And Customized Directions Posted: 19 Jan 2010 07:17 PM PST If you go to the Silverlight version of Bing Maps, at the bottom is an application gallery which adds different features and layers to the maps. Two new Silverlight apps added today are for Events and Destination Maps. The Events app brings up nearby events and places them as pins on the map. The name of the events appear in the left-hand column, where you can scroll through them and sort by popularity or date. You can also filter by specific times (today, tomorrow, this weekend, this week, next week, or a specific date range). The app also lets you narrow the search down by categories such as music, sports, performing arts, food & dining, and fairs & festivals. The Destination Maps app creates a stylized map that is good for party invites or directions. The recipient gets a simplified map showing just the route from where they are coming from to where they are going, and the maps can be skinned with different background themes including a a European road map or a pirate treasure map (below).
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| SlideScreen for Android Borders On Information Overload (In A Good Way) Posted: 19 Jan 2010 06:05 PM PST Let me start off by saying this: I really rather like the default Android homescreen. It's simple, it's functional, and above all, it's endlessly customizable. Thanks to Google's "do anything" approach to handling app development, end users have countless tools to trick out their phones anyway they want. That, as anyone who's ever used MySpace knows, is a double-edged sword: the end results are usually range from the rare and wonderful to the terribly tacky. The guys over at Larva Labs have taken a different, almost Facebookian approach. Instead of allowing users to directly get their hands dirty, they completely stripped down the Android into a sparse, information-oriented design they call SlideScreen, which looks something like a mashup between WinMo 6.5 today screen and HTC's minimalist TouchFLO style. I was given the chance to play with a nearly final build of the app, which is slated for general release within the next few days, and for you info junkies out there, this may be exactly what you’ve been looking for. Read the rest of this post at MobileCrunch >>
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| It Looks Like Loic Is Getting Ready To Launch Seesmic Look Posted: 19 Jan 2010 04:44 PM PST Seesmic is going to announce a new product on Thursday. Earlier today, I received an email invitation to attend a “private event” in New York City on Thursday “at which Seesmic and several of its partners will announce a new application that has the potential change the way consumers and brand marketers experience Twitter.” What is it? The email didn’t say, but Seesmic CEO Loic Le Meur left a clue on Twitter when he broadcasted that he was “taking a look at a cool new app.” The message was sent from “from Seesmic Look.” (He left a clue like this before when he bought Ping.fm). Twitter identifies not just the person, but also the application from where a message originates. When you click on Seesmic Look it takes you to a landing page for an upcoming product launch on Thursday. So what exactly is Seesmic Look? Well, we know that it will involve “brand marketers” and thus may be the first time Seesmic brings some form of advertising to its product, which is one of the more popular Twitter clients across the desktop, the Web, a native client for Windows7, and mobile platforms (Android and Blackberry). But all of these clients so far are aimed at Twitter power users. Seesmic Look sounds more like a women’s magazine. Could this be a new, simplified product which tries to appeal to the masses? Bringing Twitter to more mainstream consumers is certainly the type of application which would appeal to brand marketers. Now maybe I’m reading too much into things, but Loic left another clue to that effect last year when he put up a YouTube video with “30 Predictions for Twitter.” I’ve embedded it below, but you can just jump to the 1:12 mark where he points out that mainstream users “won’t use the same tools as we do. The current tools, including ours are really, really aiming at the power users, the very first Twitter users.” He says that there will be a “dramatic change” in the Twitter tools and apps to make then “much easier to use” and “more accessible to the public.” He then slips and says, “You will see, I think, at least we will make it.” Ever since I first saw that video, I’ve been wondering when we’ll see Seesmic’s Twitter app for the masses. Maybe we’ll finally get a look at it on Thursday.
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| Bill Gates Rejoins Facebook, Gives Twitter A Try Too Posted: 19 Jan 2010 03:56 PM PST
Gates’ first updates on Twitter, which were first noticed by TheNextWeb are mostly related to the crisis in Haiti, which may well have spurred his decision to join. President Obama recently sent his first tweet from an aid center in Haiti, and plenty of other celebrities have used the platform to help encourage donations. The new Twitter account has been verified by Twitter as the real deal. We’re still waiting to hear back from Facebook to confirm that the Facebook.com/BillGates page is legitimate, but it seems to be. Update: Facebook has confirmed that the account is real. The account appears to have been created last month, but didn’t have any updates posted until a few hours ago, and both accounts use the same profile photo. His first update was a link to his charitable Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. His second shared item? A link to Microsoft.com, which isn’t going to win him any creativity points. Other shared items include photo albums of his trips to Africa and India, and a link to the homepage of the prep school he attended. As some of our commenters have pointed out, Gates won’t have to deal with the countless friend requests he used to get on Facebook, because both Twitter and his Facebook Page use one sided connections — anyone can follow him without any action required on his part.
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| Foursquare Checks-In A General Manager: Former Bebo VP Evan Cohen Posted: 19 Jan 2010 03:43 PM PST
If the title sounds a bit odd, it’s because Foursquare is avoiding having executive-sounding positions, Crowley says. But Cohen’s role will be vital for the startup as he’ll be basically stepping in for much of what takes up Crowley’s time now: big deals, hiring, outgrowing our space, finances, and legal issues. “Everything that takes me away from product,” Crowley notes. In other words, basically he’ll be the COO of the young startup. Cohen joins Foursquare at a time when the location-based atmosphere is red hot. Not only are Foursquare, Gowalla, and Loopt pushing the check-in game, but Yelp, with its 1.25 million iPhone users just got into the game as well. Crowley noted earlier today that it was one year ago when he and co-founder Naveen Selvadurai decided to take Foursquare seriously as a new business. “Our growth curve no longer looks like a hockey stick. It looks like a skateboard ramp with 4 feet of vert. Bananatown,” Foursquare tweeted from its main Twitter account earlier today. Cohen left Bebo sometime after it was acquired by AOL in 2008. He was currently in between jobs, but him and Crowley go way back to Crowley’s first job at Jupiter Research. Cohen brings the total number of Foursquare employees up to eight. Expect that number to keep blossoming with the Cohen hire.
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| Why In The Name Of All That Is Wonderful Would You Want A Tablet With A 5″ Screen? Posted: 19 Jan 2010 02:43 PM PST  Dell debuted some sort of slate product at CES. At first I was intrigued, and then someone told me the size. Five inch screen. Five inches, people. That's one and a half inches more than an iPhone. Take your thumbs and index fingers and make a little window with them — you know, like a photographer or director does. That's about five inches if your hands are at all like mine. Consuming any real amount media- and text-rich content on a device that size sounds about as pleasant as eating glass. Others, too, are bringing knives to the gun fight. Asus has a 6-inch, full-color e-book reader (why?), and HP is of course collaborating on a medium-sized, mundane tablette with Microsoft, which itself has apparently left the Courier, a genuinely innovative product, on a drawing board somewhere. Haven't these guys heard of Archos and Viliv? There are already MIDs out there that do essentially what these allegedly next-generation devices are supposed to. The iSlate supposedly has a 10.6-inch screen. Did the competition really think half that would be enough?
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| Microsoft To Emergency Patch IE As The Web Gathers With Pitchforks Around IE6 Posted: 19 Jan 2010 12:18 PM PST
While not specifically stated in the post, this move seems to be a direct response to word that IE6 was to blame for the large-scale Chinese attacks on a number of large web companies recently. As you have no doubt heard, this included Google, which prompted them to say they would stop censoring search results in China, and could be kicked out of the country as a result. Microsoft has denied that it was targeted in this hacking, but has admitted a vulnerability in IE was at least partially to blame. According to Microsoft, attacks aimed at the browser are still ongoing. In noting this security upgrade, Microsoft also says that it is recommending that all its customers upgrade to Internet Explorer 8, the latest version of the browser which has better security in place. Of course, Microsoft’s own investigation has found that IE8 is vulnerable as well. It’s a nightmare. Following the attacks, even adamant Microsoft supporters are joining a chorus that has existed for years: that Microsoft should kill off IE6. Unfortunately, there are a number of companies that still have to use the browser because they have systems in place built specifically to run with it. That, of course, is also Microsoft’s own fault since they decided for years to use their own proprietary web code when everyone else started to rally around web standards. While the company has been getting better at that, IE remains the browser that is by far the worst when it comes to compatibility with web standards. And Microsoft is still only now making efforts to play nicer with the W3C, the body that oversees web standards. And that’s only because IE continues to bleed market share. Here’s the key nugget from Microsoft’s statement today:
[photo: flickr/robert couse-baker]
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File sharing and synchronization service provider 
It’s becoming increasingly common for the web’s many publishers to offer their own native smartphone applications in addition to mobile-optimized web versions. But few web publishers have the resources to actually develop an app for themselves. 
The 
Right off the heels of announcing 
Offers to buy Facebook common stock have surged to $32 per share on 
The White House has 
This morning, Norwegian browser maker 
Readers seem pretty split about what to think of 
Last summer, Microsoft founder Bill Gates made the somewhat surprising announcement that he was 
Amid 
When Microsoft updates its software, it typically likes to do so in bulk, which it often calls “Patch Tuesday.” But amid growing controversy around the vulnerability of its Internet Explorer web browser, and particularly IE6, Microsoft has decided to go “out of band” and release the update as a stand-alone fix, which it will do ASAP, it | You are subscribed to email updates from TechCrunch To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
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