The BlackBerry Partners Fund, a $150 million VC fund co-managed by JLA Ventures and RBC Venture Partners, has announced its first three investments:
The first is for buzzd, a geo-aware social network that also doubles as a location information guide. BlackBerry Partners Fund participated in a $3.2 million Series A Round, along with Greycroft Partners, Qualcomm Ventures, and Monitor Ventures.
The second is for Digby, a mobile ecommerce company, that closed a $5.5 million Series B round with BBPF and existing investors.
The third is for WorldMate, a company that produces software for travelers, offering tools for trip management and information lookup. The company closed an $8 million Series C round with BBPF, AMC Communications, and Motorola Ventures. → Read More
LinkedIn has launched its new OpenSocial-based application platform called InApps – an answer to the platforms found on social networks like Facebook and MySpace, but without the clutter and “junk” apps that plague those sites. Unlike most other social networks, LinkedIn apps must go through an approval process before they will go live on the store, and all apps must be deemed “professional” in purpose to appear on the business-oriented social network. To prevent an overwhelming amount of clutter, users will be restricted to including a maximum of 15 applications on their main profile pages, though they will eventually have the option to install more apps on a separate page.
Beyond the quality assurance process, LinkedIn is also limiting the flexibility apps will have when it comes to monetization. Apps won’t be allowed to use third party ad networks – instead, they’ll have to work with LinkedIn’s ad system. For now applications will only have access to LinkedIn’s current ad inventory, which could make targeting ads less effective (though it sounds like there will be more options for targeted ads in the future). Apps will still be allowed to charge users for individual goods, and can also implement a paid subscription service (launch partner Box.net is using this model). → Read More
With the doors to the Android Market open to developers as of yesterday, the applications have begun pouring in. To celebrate, we decided to take a look at some of the notable applications lurking about in this first batch. Notable, mind you, doesn’t necessarily mean the best. A few were highlighted for their greatness. Some were noted because we just like the concept. And the others? Well, they were just too weird not to mention. Title: Twidroid Summary: One of the first, and best Twitter clients out there for Android so far. Twidroid does what you expect it to, and has some great features in the works, such as photo uploading and background updating so you can always get the latest tweets. Replying to your fellow Twitts is a breeze as well, just press the direct or public reply button. The Good: Easy to use, clean interface. The Bad: The photo feature isn’t quite ready for the masses, but they decided to leave it in there anyway. Sometimes gets stuck loading tweets. Worth the download? Definitely. If you use Twitter and don’t want to do it through the web interface, this is the best alternative so far. → Read More
User reviews of Guitar Hero World Tour aren’t so hot—it’s averaging a 5.8 on Metacritic (but nets an 87 based on “professional” reviews). One reason for the low score is this weird drum kit sensitivity issue that a bunch of people are reporting. Activision, the game’s publisher, says the problem only affects an early run of drums. Be that as it may, Activision says it will offer a drum tuning kit to help you out if yours is malfunctioning. You’ll need to head to activision.com/support to get the “fix my game, please” process started. Meanwhile, Rock Band 2 is doing a little better on Metacritic. → Read More
For all of the millions of blogs on the web, only an incredibly small fraction generate enough revenue to serve as full time jobs. Most people are happy enough with just sharing their thoughts with the public, even if they only see a few hundred hits a months with the very occasional comment. But what if there was a way for even these small-timers to generate enough money to put food on the table?
Larry Genkin, the founder and editor of Blogger and Podcaster Magazine, is looking to help the long tail of bloggers turn their hobby into a lucrative job. He has started the Blogger and Podcaster Media Network, a consortium of bloggers and related companies looking to help bloggers of all sizes effectively monetize their sites without having to worry about having a relatively small audience. The site is currently open for signups, but won’t go live until early next year. → Read More
T-Online Venture and the European Founders Fund (the investment vehicle of the infamous Samwer brothers who recently invested in Facebook) have invested a total of €7 million or nearly $9 million in Netviewer, a provider of web-based collaboration and communication software. → Read More
Fresh on the heels of being dropped as the premier video platform for The NYTimes.com in favor of Brightcove, The FeedRoom has unveiled the latest iteration of its enterprise video platform.
The release of FeedRoom 4.0 Enterprise Video Platform (EVP) was announced at the 2008 Forrester Consumer Forum. The platform is built on two key components: FeedRoom ContentCore, which acts as a central content repository, and FeedRoom Studio, an Adobe Flex-powered dashboard for managing online videos. → Read More
Ever use the Myvu Crystal? It’s a pair of glasses that has a built-in VGA-quality display. The idea here is that you connect the Crystal to your portable media player or cellphone and you can take immersive audio/video with you wherever you go. That’s the idea, but like I said I haven’t used them so I can’t speak to how well they work. Doug seemed to like it, though. In any event (which is my latest crutch of a phrase, you may have noticed) the Crystal is now fully compatible with the iPhone 3G. You need to buy a separate $25 cable to get your Crystal and iPhone to play nice. Photo from Flickr → Read More
Job search engine Simply Hired is expanding its operations into Canada, UK, Australia and India. The venture-backed startup was once an acquisition target for Google, and was recently called out for showing enormous jumps in traffic numbers that may have had something to do with shady tactics.
Depending on where you look, the company says their database contains in between four and seven million jobs, and claims that 1.5 million will be added thanks to the international expansion. → Read More
The majority (51 percent) of wireless access points in New York City are completely insecure, either using no security whatsoever or relying on WEP, which is all but useless. That number excludes publicly accessible hotspots you’d find at a café or park, meaning that a majority of those blue little routers sitting in the corner of every New York City apartment can be broken into with little to no effort. The above video shows how easily it is to crack WEP. Note that WPA can also be cracked, but that requires a little more effort (though just barely—this stuff moves fast, as you can imagine.) Those are some of the findings of the most recent Wireless Security Survey, which is conducted by RSA. Other tidbits of information—that London has the most wireless access points of any city on Earth (12,276 of them, which is some 3,000 more than New York has); Paris has seen 543 percent jump in the number of wireless access points—pepper the report but aren’t nearly as interesting. Again, I feel like I say this every other day, but you really ought to secure your Wi-Fi router, especially if you live in a densely populated area, like, say, an apartment building. That means WPA or greater, because all it takes is one kid with a few minutes of free time and the will to do some damage to get you into hot water. via Slashdot → Read More
We just received word that tonight at 9pm PT Flixster will roll out its integration of Meebo Community IM, which adds instant messaging-like chat functionality to any website.
Out of 19 total launch partners, a couple more will push their implementations live over the next two weeks, then a large batch of partners will launch theirs in early 2009. We don’t have any word yet on which partners will be next and exactly when they plan to launch.
Watch a demo video of Flixster’s integration below: → Read More
Steve Gillmor is at the Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles where he caught Microsoft senior exec Bob Muglia on camera for an interview that touches upon Microsoft’s new cloud initiatives, how it relates to its existing server business, Silverlight, and what Microsoft is like without Bill Gates around every day. Muglia is the senior vice president in charge of the server and tools business, which was responsible for $3.4 billion in revenues last quarter alone. Here’s what he had to say: http://qik.com/swfs/qik_player.swf?streamname=7525006e13484923b3a4c1f7c335d3ff&vid=469725&playback=false&polling=false&user=SteveGillmor&displayname=SteveGillmor&safelink=SteveGillmor&userlock=true&islive=&username=anonymous → Read More
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer sent an email to customers today (reprinted below) summarizing some of the big news coming out of the Professional Developers Conference (PDC) in Los Angeles. He talks about both the Azure cloud services platform (a comprehensive set of storage, computing, and networking infrastructure services) as well as Office in the browser.
The email reiterates Microsoft’s core messaging that the Internet is fine, but it needs a little desktop software to really make it hum: “the key to delivering value today and in the future lies in combining the best aspects of software running on PCs, servers, and devices with the best aspects of services running on the Web-an approach we call “software plus services.”"
Client software is needed, he argues, to take full advantage of the hardware on devices. Multicore processors and new programming languages will expand computing capabilities, he says, and “the interactive experiences that people expect on their PC, mobile phone, and media player depend on sophisticated software running on powerful processors”:
In other words, software does the heavy lifting, and the browser makes access and communication easy: “For the Web, it’s the ability to bring together people, information, and services so we can connect, communicate, share, and transact with anyone, anywhere, at any time.”
The full email is below. → Read More
Dear school administrators, What’s the best way to ensure that your computer network remains riddled with security vulnerabilities that leave you, your personnel and [someone think of the] schoolchildren in danger? Why, to demonize the student who discovered the vulnerability and alerted you to it, of course. Have him charged with a felony while you’re at it. A student in a Saratoga County (New York) school alerted his principal to a computer security vulnerability that could expose the names, social security numbers and addresses of school employees. While the student tried to do it anonymously, he was eventually tracked down. Then the school threw the book at him. The student is now being charged with three felonies for his unauthorized use of the computer network. The best is this quote from a state trooper: The kid committed an intentional criminal act. He deceitfully used someone else’s name and password so he would not get caught and was looking to profit from his criminal act. The only thing we can take away from this is, even if you discover a security vulnerability, it’s completely in your best interest to keep it to yourself, otherwise you’ll be branded a criminal terrorist when you were merely trying to do a good deed. Or, if you insist on doing the right then, use Wikileaks. → Read More
