While the early history of the Internet is littered with the corpses of music start-ups, not all digital music companies have failed. Take, for example, Gracenote. Founded in 1998, the Berkeley based company was sold to Sony in 2008 for $260 million and is one of the real pioneers of the evolving digital economy. Gracenote has built its business out of maintaining and licensing a massive (currently 100 million tracks) database of information about music. And today, Gracenote – with its 350 employees in Europe, the US and Asia – is expanding into licensing digital data for video and television content. → Read More
Research firm eMarketer has put together a few interesting data points that show Google doing better in display ads than you might have realized. That is, by growing this business across properties that it at some point acquired – YouTube, DoubleClick, and mobile (AdMob) – it’s set to pass Facebook’s own display business.
The social network had the highest online ad sales of any company in the US last year, at $1.73 billion. But that was a mere $200 million or so above Google. This year, eMarketer expects a similar story, with Facebook bringing in $2.58 billion versus Google’s $2.54 billion. Things change in 2013 and 2014, further off from what the data can tell us accurately. → Read More
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There’s a new startup called Tugg launching today — it’s led by Nicolas Gonda, who was a producer on The Tree Of Life, and it promises audience members that they can create their own movie screenings at local theaters.
When I asked why theaters would want to do this, Gonda and his co-founder Pablo Gonzalez (they’re CEO and COO, respectively) said via email that the idea came from Gonda’s work with filmmakers — this is supposed to complement existing distribution methods. → Read More
Job boards and company profiles on job sites can be fairly uninspiring, and bland. Usually there’s a boring description of a job, followed by a list of skills needed followed by a boring description of the company.
Enter Y Combinator-backed The Daily Muse, which is a community for professional women. Today the site is launching company profiles: a new job board that not only presents company backgrounds in a compelling way, but also aims to make job listings more interesting. → Read More
Retickr, a social news reader application for Mac OS X, received a big update today, as well as a new round of funding. The startup just closed its Series A of $1.5 million led by the Lamp Post Group, the investors who had previously put $150,000 into the company’s seed round.
The app, which combines RSS, social networking updates and news, is not your standard feed reader, but rather attempts to personalize your news reading experience the more you use the product. → Read More
For various reasons (groan) I’m not heading to SXSW this year, but then neither are millions of other people. But that won’t stop the 20,000 attendees from clogging up our Twitter feeds trying to find each other in the nearest bar, tweeting incessantly about some “awesome” panel session you are not at or generally conversing about in-jokes you weren’t there to witness.
That’s why you need a handy way of temporarily blocking those tweets or those people – or maybe even both.
Last year there was a handy browser extension that blocks SXSW tweets. This year the people behind it are now in a former YC startup, Lanyrd, and they’re at it again, this time with an improved product.
→ Read More
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SAP dropped a whopping $3.4 billion on human capital management software company SuccessFactors back in December. Two months later, the deal has finally closed and SAP isn’t wasting any time in releasing a product roadmap for SuccessFactors now that the company is part of the SAP family.
As the New York Times reported back in December, SAP saw SuccessFactors as one entry point into the cloud. Forrester analyst Paul Hamerman told the publication at the time that “The cloud has been a small part of SAP’s revenue stream, about 2 percent; the deal adds to the revenue base and shows SAP’s strong commitment to the software-as-a-service business model.”
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UltraViolet might sound too good to be true, but the service is growing. More Blu-ray titles are featuring the digital media option and consumers are at least trying the movie industry’s alternative to, well, piracy. iSupply just announced that there are now more than 800,000 household accounts, up from 750,000 at the beginning of 2012. But so far it seems most of those accounts are just testing the waters as iSupply notes that the average account has 1.25 titles. That results in over 1 million digital films for UltraViolet but also paints a picture that consumers aren’t too sure about the service. → Read More
Calling all developers: if you know your way around HTML5 and JavaSrcipt and have a great idea for an app, Mozilla wants to hear from you. The web-friendly nonprofit has just announced their intention to launch a new cross-platform app market later this year, and the submission process is slated to start next week at Mobile World Congress. → Read More
I’ve enjoyed the PS Vita for a couple of weeks now. It’s a fun device, but as John describes in our review, it feels like the last of its kind. Single function devices are no longer relevant and as much as Sony tried, the Vita is still pretty much a dedicated gaming handheld.
The company launched an app store for the Vita today, which folds Facebook, Netflix, Twitter, and Flickr apps into the Vita’s ecosystem. With these apps, along with the powerful hardware and 3G connectivity, the $249 Vita could be a good alternative to a traditional tablet. The only thing it’s missing is a proper web browser. → Read More
While Apple is busy fighting Proview over the iPad trademark in China, it has lost a different trademark battle in Europe: Wapple, the mobile web developers, have won a suit filed by Apple over its name.
The suit, originally filed in 2007, claimed that Wapple was trading on Apple’s brand association and name, although Wapple had filed for a trademark on “Wapple” in 2006. → Read More
ToutApp, the email productivity app that emerged as part of the 500Startups Summer Accelerator program last year, is rolling out a new feature that will let users track their emails right from within Salesforce. With the update, users will be able to see who viewed their emails, when they were viewed, where they were viewed, what the recipient clicked on, and how long they read the email.
Creepy? OK, maybe. But for serious CRM users, it’s kind of great, too. → Read More
When serial entrepreneur Martin Varsavky launched Fon in late 2005, his goal was to blanket the world with easily-accessible, crowdsourced Wi-Fi. While the service hasn’t quite made it everywhere yet, Fon has just announced that they now have over 5 million hotspots in operation across the globe. → Read More
If you want to see what your friends or contacts are up to, you can check out Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or Instagram for a realtime feed. But what if you want to read news about your friends? That’s a little bit trickier, which is why Newsle was born. Axel Hansen and Jonah Varon created the site in early 2011 as a way to find out more about what their friends and people they met at school were up to during the summer, and beyond. At the time, Hansen and Varon were sophomores at Harvard, but they’ve since taken leave and have moved to San Francisco to focus on Newsle full-time. (Sounds like a familiar story, doesn’t it?) → Read More
The European Union says it will refer the controversial ACTA anti-piracy trade agreement to the institution’s highest court, the European Court of Justice, to check whether it complies with the EU’s fundamental rights.
EU trade chief Karel De Gucht is leading the process. He said: “We are planning to ask Europe’s highest court to assess ACTA’s compatibility with the EU’s fundamental rights and freedoms, such as freedom of expression and information or that of protection… Let me be very clear: I share people’s concern for these fundamental freedoms… especially over the freedom of the Internet.”
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140 Proof, a startup that says it delivers targeted ads to more than 50 social apps, is adding a video ad unit to its lineup.
Like the company’s existing 140-character text units, the videos can show up in the social stream of any app running 140 Proof ads. Users should be able to click and watch the video without leaving the page, rate it, and bring up a feed of all the tweets mentioning the advertiser’s hashtag. → Read More
More news from Yandex, Russia’s biggest search engine, that highlights the opportunity for more growth in digital in Russia and adjacent markets. One day after announcing a new real-time search partnership with Twitter, the company is reporting Q4 earnings: sales were at $200 million with net income of $71.3 million, both representing growth respectively of 56 percent and 51 percent on the same quarter a year ago. → Read More
Well, you have to hand it to the strategy team over at Zipcar. Arguably the largest on-demand car-sharing network, Zipcar went public last year and not long after saw its market cap cross $1 billion. It’s since fallen back, and with collaborative consumption and the market for car-sharing heating up, the big players have to make moves. Zipcar has since forged a partnership with Ford, making it the largest provider of cars for Zipcar’s University program, and, in December, the company took a controlling stake in Spain’s largest car-sharing network, Avancar.
Today finds Zipcar making another strategic move to get its mitts in fellow car-sharing companies, again with a focus on universities, whose students are among the most eager adopters of car-sharing models. What do I mean? The company today announced that it is a lead investor in the $13.7 million Series A financing of Wheelz, a junior, university-focused version of itself. → Read More
Are you ready for a revolution? Today, after 3 years of machine learning development in stealth, BloomReach reveals its big data solution for website relevance optimization. BloomReach is capable of boosting organic search traffic by a whopping 80%, and will flip the search engine optimization and marketing industries upside down.
With a huge problem, a team of industry rockstars backed by $16 million from Bain Capital Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners, and the patented technology capable of executing, BloomReach could become the first $10 billion enterprise marketing company, joining other core solutions like Oracle, SAP, and Salesforce. SEO is dead, long live big data SEO. → Read More
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