Archive for July, 2008

« Older Entries
Jul 31 2008
thumbnail

Teen Social Network myYearbook Gets $13 Million

myYearbook, a social network for teenagers that launched in 2005, has raised $13 million in a Series B funding round led by Norwest Venture Partners, US Venture Partners, and First Round Capital. The new round brings the company’s total funding to $18.6 million. myYearbook says it sees 10 million unique visitors monthly, and also makes the claim that it is the third largest social network in the US. (Not quite. It is only a fraction of the size of MySpace or Facebook, and Bebo and imeem also attract more monthly unique visitors. According to comScore, myYearbook had 4.5 million unique visitors in June, versus 5.2 million for Bebo and 6.4 million for imeem). When we last wrote about them, there was speculation that the site may have ...
»
Jul 30 2008
thumbnail

Gazelle: Sell Stuff Without Doing the Craigslist/eBay Dance

CG’s Devin writes: I doubt you guys have quite the amount of gadget clutter as those of use who accrue them for a living, but if you’ve even got half our volume of old cameras, phones, and devices in general laying around you may find Gazelle’s service helpful. Not everyone has a used computer recycler like RePC in the Northwest. And while GameStop might buy your DS and there’s always Craigslist, it might be nice to have a central location with competitive (and market-generated) pricing for your old gear. It’ll recycle stuff for you as well if it has no market value. They wouldn’t buy my Trace, and they offered me $74 for my Ocean, which is probably market value although I bet I could get $100 if I tried real hard ...
»
Jul 29 2008
thumbnail

DataCase iPhone App Video: Turn Your iPhone Into A Wireless Drive

After two weeks of all the iPhone apps I care to download, I can say this: most of them are useless. I use a few of them daily (Facebook, MySpace, Loopt, Phonesaber) and a few others occasionally (BoxOffice, Pandora, Twitterific). Most, though, sit unused after testing and are far from being “must-have applications.” DataCase, though, looks to be different. It will turn your iPhone into a wireless drive for file storage, and includes a viewer for most popular file formats (Office, PDF, etc.). The application has been highly anticipated but is yet to launch - the creator says by email that they want it to be perfect before releasing it. For now we have to settle for the demo video that they just put up on YouTube and is embedded below. DataCase ...
»
Jul 28 2008
thumbnail

Mobile Web Wars Live Stream

Here’s the live stream of our Mobile Web Wars Roundtable, which starts at 3PM PT and ends at 5 PM. The Roundtable is a freewheeling discussion about whether the mobile Web is finally here and which platform will win going forward. While the iPhone seems like a slam dunk right now, can older platforms like Nokia’s Symbian or Windows Mobile replicate its success? Does Apple have anything to fear from Google’s Android? To help answer these questions we have an amazing group of mobile startup CEOs, top iPhone app developers, and other technologists on the RoundTable. Please add your own comment or questions inside the video player or Twitter them to MobileWars. I will try to incorporate questions from the Web audience in the discussion. Free video streaming by ...
»
Jul 27 2008
thumbnail

AOL Makes Big Budget Cuts Across Blogs (Updated)

AOL is making across the board budget cuts on its blogging properties, we’re hearing from multiple sources. The cuts range up to 25% of each properties total budget, which falls mostly on personnel costs - bloggers are simply being told to take a couple of weeks off for now, and there may or may not be work for them later in August. One area that seems to be immune from the cuts: The Tech Network (including Engadget), which continues to grow like a weed and drives substantial revenue. Employees across AOL are being asked to cut down on expenses as much as possible, even minor ones. One person complains that they’re cutting things like free bagels, and are being asked to limit travel as much as possible. Are more big layoffs ...
»
Jul 24 2008
thumbnail

Google Launches Knol, The Monetizable Wikipedia

Today Google has launched Knol, its Wikipedia alternative that holds authors accountable for the articles they write. Each article is created by a team of authors who receive attribution, and are allowed to take part in a rev-share for AdSense ads on their page. Other users can submit changes, but they have to be approved by the article’s original authors before they go live on the site (it’s basically a moderated Wikipedia). Google says that it will allow multiple people to create Knols on the same subject. Knol allows users to rate and review Knols, and will likely include ranking as part of search results so we don’t have to sift through countless articles on the same topics. You can see an example article (a Knol that ...
»
Jul 23 2008
thumbnail

Propeller 2.0 Launches: Ditching The Vote Count, Adding A Mascot

Propeller, AOL’s Digg-like news site, launches version 2.0 later this morning. The site sports a new design and logo and now has a mascot - described as “part professor, part citizen journalist” (see image below). But the biggest feature change is the removal of a pure Digg-like vote count. In its place is an algorithm based popularity ranking of 1-10, which takes into account “many more aspects of participation” when determining popularity. Voting on a story is now called the more nebulous “prop it.” The service has also cut down the number of news categories. Those remaining include Arts & Entertainment, Business & Finance, Family, Humor, News, Science & Technology, Sports and Style. Taking a page from the Yahoo Buzz playbook, headlines from the service will also be integrated directly into AOL ...
»
Jul 20 2008
thumbnail

StumbleAudio is Pandora For Indie Music

With the highly successful launch seen by Pandora’s iPhone app, streaming digital radio seems ready to finally go mainstream. Unfortunately, as great as Pandora is, its music recommendations can shy towards music you already know - you may like the song that gets recommended, but there’s a good chance you’ve heard it before. For listeners looking for something that’s entirely new, there’s StumbleAudio, a streaming music service exclusively for indie music that is launching today with a catalog of over 120,000 artists and 2 million songs. As the name implies, StumbleAudio is designed to help listeners discover new music, rather than find their old favorites. The site uses a search format very similar to streaming music services like Jango and Pandora. Instead of searching for a specific ...
»
Jul 20 2008
thumbnail

StumbleAudio is Pandora For Indie Music

With the highly successful launch seen by Pandora’s iPhone app, streaming digital radio seems ready to finally go mainstream. Unfortunately, as great as Pandora is, its music recommendations can shy towards music you already know - you may like the song that gets recommended, but there’s a good chance you’ve heard it before. For listeners looking for something that’s entirely new, there’s StumbleAudio, a streaming music service exclusively for indie music that is launching today with a catalog of over 120,000 artists and 2 million songs. As the name implies, StumbleAudio is designed to help listeners discover new music, rather than find their old favorites. The site uses a search format very similar to streaming music services like Jango and Pandora. Instead of searching for a specific ...
»
Jul 19 2008
thumbnail

Amazon To Target $5.5 Billion Textbook Market With New Kindle?

Earlier this week Crunchgear broke the news on two new upcoming Kindle models: a smaller form factor Kindle to be released this year ahead of the holidays, and a large screen (probably 8.5×11) to come sometime next year. A couple of commenters in that post have pointed out that the large screen Kindle is perfect to target the college/university textbook market, a $5.5 billion market annually in the U.S. alone. Most students still buy print versions of textbooks, and carrying them around is as big a pain as it has been for past generations of students. Most publishers now offer electronic versions of their textbooks - McGraw-Hill Education, for example, publishes 95% of their books electronically as well as in print. But there is no compelling device to read them on. The ...
»
« Older Entries

  • My Youtube Favorites

    Youtube Favorites by Ozh


    • las ramblas