Hard, impacted stool? Try Grape Nuts. Isn’t there a war on? Shouldn’t Sony be doing something better with its R&D budget? → Read More
Barry Diller won a court battle today against Liberty Media’s John Malone. Now Diller can finally go ahead with his plan to break up InterActive Corp. into five pieces—HSN, Ticketmaster, Lending Tree, Interval International, and the new IAC (Ask.com, Bloglines, Citysearch, Evite, iWon, Match.com, BustedTees, Vimeo, GarageGames, and CollegeHumor). Malone, IAC’s largest shareholder, was trying to prevent the spin-offs from happening. Whether the financial maneuver will “unlock” any value for shareholders remains to be seen. (I’d be surprised if it did). But there is no doubt that IAC is an unwieldy, multi-headed beast whose collection of disparate businesses never really had much to do with one another. As I reported last November: Diller will continue as CEO and chairman of IAC, which still remains somewhat of a grab bag of about 30 Websites. But at least those businesses are starting to finally be able to stand on their own feet. It doesn’t make much sense for them to be weighed down by Lending Tree because of the mortgage credit crisis or overshadowed by the Home Shopping Network. IAC’s holding company model gave shelter to its startups with the earnings of its more established operations, but any troubles in the larger businesses are difficult for the smaller ones to overcome no matter how fast they are growing. The problem, as came out during the trial, is that those underlying Web businesses are not growing as fast as Diller had hoped either. Ask.com failed to reach its goal of doubling its market share of search, and Ticketmaster missed out on the growth of the secondary ticket market and recently had to buy TicketsNow for $265 million to compete with StubHub (owned by eBay). Can an independent IAC compete more effectively against Web startups, or is it just a collection of Web 1.0 dogs? (Photo by JDLasica). CrunchBase Information IAC Ask Citysearch Evite Match.com Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Look how big I made this photo of the BlackBerry Curve! It’s one of five sorta new handsets that’ll be available on the Verizon network in the not too distant future. Let’s run through them all one by one, shall we? → Read More
San Mateo based mobile phone advertising provider AdMob has passed the 20 billion ads served mark. Since March 2007 the company’s monthly impressions have grown from 500 million ads per month to 2.5 billion advertisements per month today. AdMob’s 20 billionth ad impression was from financial services conglomerate HDFC. The ad was served in India at 1:56am GMT on Tuesday, March 25, while a visitor was browsing Cricinfo’s mobile web site on a Nokia N70. We’ve covered AdMob a couple of times, but it’s a company doing some big numbers that we don’t hear that much about. Their client list is first rate: companies currently using AdMob include Porsche, Ford, Toyota, Adidas, CoverGirl, Herbal Essence, EA Sims, Terminix, TruGreen and Let’s Talk. Where it gets better (and why this is a company just waiting to be bought out) is two key clients: Google and Yahoo. The web’s two leading companies are using AdMob to advertise their services on mobile phones. \ CrunchBase Information AdMob Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Everybody wants to get in on social networking and user-generated video. Reality Digital, a white-label YouTube that lets media sites add video-uploading and social-networking features, raised $6.3 million in a series B financing. OpenView Venture Partners was the sole investor in the round. The company previously raised $2 million in a series A from private individuals in November, 2005. In addition to video-uploading, Reality Digital’s platform can also handle audio, blogging, mashups, mobile uploads, profiles, forums—pretty much any feature that you’d see on MySpace or Youtube. It also includes a full management suite that lets companies monitor usage and manage advertising campaigns. Customers include MTV Networks, the Travel Channel, Lonely Planet, and the Daily Reel Reality Digital also powers the back-end of Adobe Premier Express, which is Flash-based software for creating video mashups. Reality Digital competes with KickApps, VSocial, and VMix. CrunchBase Information Reality Digital KickApps VMIX Media Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
It can be hard to find good video content on the web, especially when you’re on a mobile phone. vTap wants to make things easier for you. The service, which launched last fall, aggregates video from across the web – from over 50,000 sites like ESPN, YouTube, The New York Times, and the Associated Press. It then provides fast search capabilities that recommend results even before you’re done typing. You can also use it to browse video by categories when feeling less picky. All this, however, takes a bit of effort every time you want to watch something entertaining or informative while sitting on the bus. So vTap has come out with a new “feed” feature. It takes a list of topics once and then continuously suggests videos uploaded onto the web that fall into those topics. The idea is that you can discover video tailored to your interests with very minimal effort beyond the initial setup. Feeds can be accessed either through a desktop browser or a mobile phone. Most mobile users access vTap using Windows Mobile or iPhone (one additional value of vTap is that it automatically transcodes all video into QuickTime for iPhone compatibility). vTap’s also taking the feed technology one step further by integrating it into social networks and constructing feeds based on the information people provide in their profiles. If you install either the Facebook or MySpace feed application, you’ll be able to access feeds built with not only your profile info but your friends’ as well, regardless of whether they’ve installed the app themselves. MyWaves also suggests videos for mobile users but it only builds feeds around one topic at a time (you can combine many of them with vTap). CrunchBase Information Vtap Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Update: screenshot and additional details of Publish2 is here. New startup Publish2 hasn’t launched or even entered private beta yet, but the company has scored $2.75 million in funding. The investor, Velocity Interactive Group, believes in the idea so much that they put both Ross Levinsohn and Jonathan Miller on the board of directors. Publish2 is talking freely about the product, they just won’t show it to anyone yet. The idea is to create a news resource for news rooms, who are increasingly stressed due to headcount cuts and competition with blogs. The main service will be a Digg-like social bookmarking site, says CEO Scott Karp. Like Digg, anyone can submit a link to a news story. But the only people who can vote on stories are pre-approved journalists. The goal, he says, is to avoid Digg’s spamming issues and ensure that only quality news can get to the top in any category. He says it’s “Digg, powered by journalists.” It’s sort of the opposite of Yahoo Buzz, which launched last month, in its approach. Buzz only takes links from pre-approved sites, but anyone can vote. Top stories must pass through an editor, though, before going to the Yahoo home page. It seems that everyone has tried one variation or another of Digg. In addition to Buzz, AOL launched Propeller in 2006, which also required editors to approve top stories. And there are others with models that fall somewhere in between. Publish2 will also allow newsrooms to use the service to create customized headline feeds Presumably the quality will be high because only journalists get to vote stories up. That may be true. But it’s just as likely Publish2 will end up a ghost town. One of the main reasons for Digg’s success was the viral way stories spread. People send stories to their friends to get them to Digg them up. Those people, seeing Digg perhaps for the first time, may come back to read the news. Publish2 won’t have that benefit. We’ll withhold judgment until the product launched and we can take a look for ourselves. CrunchBase Information Publish2 Digg Yahoo! Buzz Propeller Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
AOL has launched a mobile phone gaming portal powered by Cellufun. The games are available via wap.aol.com and are provided on a free, ad supported basis, and no downloads are necessary. Advertising inventory will be sold by AOL’s Platform-A’s Third Screen media. AOL will offer games including Cellufun’s Call of the Pharoah, a game that relies on a social networking “pyramid scheme” to finish it. New York based Cellufun was founded in 2005 by two former Wall Street security experts Arthur Goikhman and Steven Dacek and has attracted 5 million unique visitors to their games in the past year and 500,000 registered users. CrunchBase Information AOL Cellufun Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
I’m positive most of you have seen the Verizon commercials for the Samsung u740 that’s now being dubbed the Alias, right? Well, if you take a closer look, you’ll notice that it’s not the original gold and black finish. The u740 not only received a new name, but also a paint job and updated keyboard. All the other great features for the clamshell QWERTY are unchanged. The Alias will be available mid-April for $129.99. [photopress:alias2.png,thumb,pp_image] → Read More
Blue sunglasses will make your food look gross, and they’re supposed to Elephant cinematographers capture magical tiger moments in new BBC documentary Suit of plate armor found at Salem bus stop Navy freaking out over the “Holy Grail of Lasers” All About Linux 2008 → Read More
Yahoo has launched Shine, a new content portal aimed at women aged 25 to 54. At its core, Shine is a large blog with magazine style layout. Content is broken up into various subcategories with the front page highlighting the newest content from across the site. Topic areas include parenting, sex and love, healthy living, food, career and money, entertainment, fashion, beauty, home life, and astrology. The Wall Street Journal quotes Amy Iorio, vice president for Yahoo Lifestyles saying internal research shows women are looking for a site to aggregate various content and communications tools: “These women were sort of caretakers for everybody in their lives,” she said. “They didn’t feel like there was a place that was looking at the whole them — as a parent, as a spouse, as a daughter. They were looking for one place that gave them everything.” With Shine, Yahoo will find itself competing with offerings from Glam Media, Sugar and iVillage. Screenshots as follows. CrunchBase Information Shine Sugar Inc Glam Media iVillage Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Gears of War is grinding towards completion. Keep in mind, though, this article does not mention whether the script and director are any good. Hopefully he or she won’t use actual gameplay as part of the film, a la House of the Dead. I’m still playing the PC version of GoW and it looks great, they could probably just have a pro speedrun it (it’d be under 2 hours) and put that on the big screen with a little editing. I’d watch it. But then, I also watch Excitebike speedruns. → Read More
There’s no confirmation on this, so take it with a grain of salt, and also beware that there are SPOILERS ahead if you clicky this link. If that wasn’t spoiler-y enough for you, there are descriptions (also unconfirmed) here. Personally, I believe that the best achievements in GTA games aren’t listed, because they can’t be predicted. There should be an achievement where you upload a replay of something utterly insane that just happened, and if it meets their standards you get the achievement. Then they could pack it up and send it back out as free content to put on the ingame TVs you walk past. How am I not a game developer? [via Kotaku] → Read More
Personal shopping engine StyleFeeder.com has launched an open API that “allows social media developers to create third-party applications, widgets and integrate StyleFeeder’s key functionality into any e-commerce website.” The API includes access into StyleFeeder’s personalized search engine, bookmarking tools, item recommendations, watchlist, “StyleFeed”, “StyleTwins” and other features. The site was acquired by Top 10 Sources in 2006 (the last time we wrote about it) and took $2 million Series A from Highland Capital Partners and Schooner Ventures in January 2008. StyleFeeder claims to be the largest shopping application on Facebook with over 1 million users. CrunchBase Information StyleFeeder Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
What may be the deepest crack yet for the iPhone is coming out today next week for your perusal. It takes over “the lowest layers of Apple’s device,” allowing for unsigned, custom firmware to be dropped in. That’s more than allowing custom apps, that’s allowing for a whole different OS to be put on there, or maybe even give it the power to warm up your food. Doubtless it will soon be available for the iPod Touch as well. The PWNED toolset was supposed to be released today but they’re polishing it until next week. → Read More
[photopress:db_vader_sm.gif,full,left]If you’re a British Jedi, you must wonder about the nature of the Force and what the odds would be that while giving a TV interview about your lifestyle a drunken Darth Vader would appear wearing a garbage bag and attack you and the TV crew with a crutch. No, really, this happened. Jedi Master Jonba Hehol was sadly no match for the Dark Lord of the Sith who set about his opponent in one-on-one combat and was victorious. → Read More
[photopress:card.jpg,full,center] We’re going to try to think like Creative here. Let’s say we, as Creative, insist that our drivers for our multimedia cards were Vista-ready. Let’s say they really weren’t, they were buggy drivers with missing features. Let’s say we had no real plans to fix this. We’re a large corporation with better things to do. So let’s say a talented, independent developer takes it on himself to patch the buggy drivers to make things all work well in Vista. Let’s say he even posts links to these patched drivers, which he’s giving away to our customers for free, in our support forum. This happened. And Creative, instead of certifying his drivers and rewarding him for his hard work in making our customers happy, has banned him — and other users — from the forums and took down the links to the superior drivers. That’s just bad customer service. → Read More
The Newton Virus. It’s a virus for fun. It doesn’t harm anything or copy itself. It executes just once, with the results above. It only works on MacBooks, as it uses the motion sensor for the fun effect. It installs quickly and sneakily from a thumbdrive. Friends with MacBooks: Beware my prankster’s wrath. → Read More
[photopress:2070049523_385bca185b_o.jpg,full,center] In the 1960s most of America assumed that by 2008 we’d be driving nuclear-powered cars around. Even in Back to the Future the Delorian was powered by Mr. Fusion. But alas, anyone can tell you that we’re still chained to oil-powered internal combustion engines, just as we have been for 100 years. But a new material scienticians have developed might pave the way for nuclear-powered cars in the near future. The material takes nuclear decay and can convert it to electricity far more efficiently than ever before. Spacecraft have been using this type of “nuclear battery” for decades to propel them through space, but it’s never been effective enough for terrestrial use. More tests are needed, but the nano-tech based polymers could be adapted to be more energy efficient, enough so that they could drive a standard-sized American car. And it would do so cleanly. The scienticians say we’re still at least a decade out from utilizing the technology, but it’s entirely possible we can hang up the pumps by then. → Read More
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