Autoquake, an online used car retailer in the UK, has raised £4m from Accel and Highland Partners. Autoquake has already had a £6 million second round of funding from Highland and Accel last April. That takes total funding to date to £14 million and thus a planned international expansion. The investment comes at an interesting time for the car industry, which is in huge dire straits. Autoquake is disrupting the car retail industry by selling quality used cars on behalf of large corporate fleet and leasing companies direct to consumers. Part of the equation is a virtual showroom and high quality digital pictures of the actual cars on sale, which imparts a great deal more information to the buyer than your average eBay site. Sales are faster and the average 10% discount is higher than most traditional dealers and car supermarkets. It helps that even though modern company cars are normally thrashed to death they last incredibly well compared to a few years ago. Autoquake also does a though check of the cars prior to sale. The site claims to have doubled its sales in the last 6 months. Total sales in 2009 are expected to exceed 15,000 cars, assisted by the opening last month, of a new large-scale indoor distribution centre in Leeds to add to the existing site in Birmingham. Garry Hobson is CEO of Autoquake. This latest move by Accel merely confirms the trend that the larger VCs are concentrating on growth capital for their startups. → Read More
I’m surprised that it’s taken this long for one of these flat, easily washable keyboards to be clearly aimed at the medical establishment, not just in marketing but in design. The Medigenic Infection-control keyboard (catchy) is totally flat, and only appears to have a three-dimensional surface. This means it’s super easy to wipe down after some patient yaks all over it, or an infected monkey sneezes on it. It even comes with a mouse that has no exposed cracks where bacteria and the like can make their home. → Read More
Snapple has claimed for years that it is made from “the best stuff on earth”. Pretty tough act to follow. I mean, “best stuff” doesn’t exactly leave much room for improvement. Where do you from there? “Mo’ better stuff?” “Stuff so good we need a new descriptor”? Well luckily, I’m not doing the marketing for Snapple, because they went with “Better Stuff” – and after tasting it, I have to say I agree with them. And since you guys read this blog because you need the latest in Snapple-related news, I thought I should share it. → Read More
The problem with Google’s movement towards becoming more of a social entity is that it lacks one cohesive place to tie everything together. YouTube has social elements, Picasa has social elements, even Google Maps has social elements, but Google lacks this singular area — like a Facebook profile page — where all of this information can reside and be easily seen. But actually, it has such an area, Google Profiles — but no one really seems to talk about it, because it hasn’t been terribly useful, and it’s hard to find. But Google is now making it quite a bit easier to find.
The service now has an option to use vanity URLs for your profile page, as the blog Digital Inspiration found. This means that rather than having a page located at http://www.google.com/s2/profiles/3223lkn23lkn or some nonsense, it now can reside at http://www.google.com/profiles/YOURGMAILNAME. If you have a Gmail or Picasa account, the URL will feature the user name you chose for those. Otherwise, you can pick a name as long as it’s not taken by another Gmail/Picasa account. → Read More
SoundCloud, an audio sharing site geared towards music professionals, has closed a €2.5 million (around $3.3 million) funding round led by Doughty Hanson Technology Ventures. As part of the deal, Stefan Tirtey of Doughty Hanson will join the company’s board of directors.
We last covered SoundCloud in October, when the site launched in a private beta. Since then it has opened to the public, and now claims 100,000 registered members. The site’s primary function is to help musicians, producers, and other professionals in the music industry share and collaborate around music tracks. These tracks tend to be quite large in size, which makes them difficult to transfer (typically musicians would be forced to resort to FTP or services like YouSendIt, which are hardly ideal for frequent music swapping). → Read More
“Do you know how big we are? Do you know what CNN is?!” Them fightin’ words — from longtime CNN host Larry King to Ashton Kutcher. King sent out the YouTube video (below) responding to the challenge Kutcher laid out yesterday to beat CNN to become the first Twitter user with a million followers.
So far, it’s not working all that well for Kutcher. He is gaining followers at a remarkable rate — he now has over 870,000 followers — yesterday he had under 850,000. But CNN is gaining them just as quickly. Yesterday they stood just above 900,000 and now they’re just under 930,000. So Kutcher has stepped up his game slightly, offering Guitar Hero to the person who is his millionth follower. Come on Ashton, you can do better than that. → Read More
ComScore released its search market share numbers tonight for March, 2009 and the first quarter. After a dip in February, the number of searches done in the U.S. on Google and the other top search engines recovered in March. ComScore estimates there were 9.125 billion searches done on Google last month, up 11 percent from February. That growth outpaced the growth at the other search engines (Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL, and Ask), resulting in Google gaining half a percentage point in market share to 63.7 percent.
On an annual basis, Google’s core U.S. search volume was up 41.7 percent for the month of March and 40.6 percent for the quarter. That exceeds Yahoo’s 25.5 percent annual growth for the quarter and Microsoft’s 13.9 percent growth. → Read More
One thing is for certain – the six month old MySpace Music project is throwing off a lot of cash to the labels. That’s because MySpace’s 75 million or so U.S. users are streaming literally billions of songs a month. And they have to pay for every song streamed.
Labels are known to give streaming rates for on demand music of around half a cent per song play, but they are negotiated on a deal by deal and label by label basis. Journalists have tried repeatedly to understand the rates that MySpace is paying since the volume means lots of dollars are at stake. MySpace has always guarded this information closely, since it’s a competitively valuable piece of information. But there’s another reason they may be so secretive – the deals they cut with the four big labels may all be very different. And the deal they cut with at least one label, Warner Music, may not have streaming rates at all.
Our sources say Warner has been complaining about the deal they did with MySpace. That deal has no per song streaming cost, but includes a revenue share on advertising displayed when the song is played. That revenue share hasn’t been what they thought it would be. And the staggering number of plays of songs from their catalog, combined with their newly acquired knowledge that their competitors are being paid per stream, has left them steaming mad. → Read More
When Apple was looking for a mobile partner for the iPhone, it originally went to Verizon. When Verizon turned down the device due to some of Apple’s demands, Apple turned to AT&T, which worked out an exclusive deal with Apple to provide service for the device. Smart move. Over 17 million iPhones have been sold since the device debuted less than two year ago — the majority of which have been in the US through AT&T.
Following the launch of the iPhone 3G last year, Apple and AT&T met again to look at their partnership. The two sides decided to extend the pact until 2010. But that apparently isn’t good enough for AT&T which now wants to extend its exclusive deal into 2011, The Wall Street Journal reports. → Read More
The realtime lashback has been surprisingly tame given the emotional challenges it presents. FriendFeed’s decision to double down on realtime streaming of text has had several primary effects: increased usage, swarming behavior around live events, and pushback from some who fled Twitter to FriendFeed in search of more contemplative dialogue. What happens when a realtime conversation is possible? We already know the answer: IM. We are gently queried for permission to engage, and with social contract in hand we answer questions, catch up from where we last left off, and negotiate the outline of our next meeting. Attempts at hanging around on either end are met with increased irritation masked by politeness, until finally a rapid-fire l8r kthxbye cya dance wears out any remaining welcome. But realtime swarms have new dynamics, not readily understood or guided by agreed-upon ground rules. Where IRCs and attached video chats hew to explicit or implicit boundaries, realtime threads need their own rationale for existence to get much beyond the IM formula. For some, a debate is hung off of a blog post or podcast, with representatives of the pro and con perspectives managing the conversation flow. For others, the “post” is a statement of thesis, a challenge to engage. When oldtimers criticize these threads as nothing new, they’re usually right. Why, then, are so many of us so energized by this frontier? First, we are tired of RSS, tired of the mediocrity of the good-enough flow of half-facts and pseudo insight. Yes, I’m tired of my own bullshit, but only of my inability to adequately describe what’s in front of us. Normally I expect the pragmatic enterprise crowd to laboriously explain why this is all too early, not ready for prime time, not yet taken in by adults and layered into real tools with ROI dripping from the design. There’s plenty of that being served up. But this time around the consultants are pulling their punches, careful not to get too negative too early for fear Marc Benioff will build some stupid Twitter rationale into his next marketing blitz. Social media is the front end for cloud computing, and in a time of low employment massaging the social graph is an excellent way of foraging in the workforce for talent. Too conservative, IT matters again. Too aggressive, hard to distinguish an analyst from a blogger. The cloud manifesto gambit exposed, the platform players were → Read More
Portable media storage? What does that even mean, you ask? Don’t worry, all will be revealed. It’s not really that extreme, but it is pretty handy. The Nexto DI eXtreme is a good way to back up all your media on the go without really even thinking about it. → Read More
This a Guest Post by Mary Hodder, founder of Dabble.com, a social video search site and blogger for Napsterization. Hodder is a veteran Silicon Valley technologist and was most recently VP of Products at Apisiphere, a geolocation mobile company building an enterprise platform for mobile developers. This post is in response to the Amazon’s removal of sales rankings on a number of gay- and lesbian-themed books due to a glitch.
Webopedia defines an algorithm as:
(al´g&-rith-&m) (n.) A formula or set of steps for solving a particular problem. To be an algorithm, a set of rules must be unambiguous and have a clear stopping point. Algorithms can be expressed in any language, from natural languages like English or French to programming languages like FORTRAN.
We use algorithms every day. For example, a recipe for baking a cake is an algorithm. Most programs, with the exception of some artificial intelligence applications, consist of algorithms. Inventing elegant algorithms — algorithms that are simple and require the fewest steps possible — is one of the principal challenges in programming.
The ethical issue with algorithms and information systems generally is that they make choices about what information to use, or display or hide, and this makes them very powerful. These choices are never made in a vacuum and reflect both the conscious and subconscious assumptions and ideas of their creators. → Read More
As I mentioned earlier, Honda is in town to demo their two walking assist devices for the first time in the US. I was given the opportunity to test both models out in midtown Manhattan this afternoon. The applications for both models are pretty obvious and Honda has been testing the Bodyweight Support Assist at their Saitama factory since November of last year.
Update: The entire presentation including the Q&A is now available to watch after the jump. → Read More
If you tried to order a Steel Cake chrono lately, you might have noticed a slight problem, they’ve been out of stock. The good news is that we got an email from them today, and they have them back in stock again. → Read More
You kids with your fancy Bluetooth headsets and your fancy satellite radio and your portable music players magically transmitting stuff to other devices without any wires. You think you’re all so special. Well I got news for you, bub: wireless headphones were available on a Sony Walkman — you know, the kind that used cassette tapes — in 1988! Stick that in your pipe and smoke it, hotshot! → Read More
Mobile analytics and advertising company Medialets is announcing a big milestone tomorrow with regards to the number one billion and the iPhone. Okay, not that billion milestone — but it’s pretty impressive none the less.
Medialets has now processed over a billion events on the iPhone and iPod touch by way of its analytics product, Medialytics. What this means is that the company, which launched on the same day as Apple App Store last July, has seen that much activity coming from the apps that use it on those platforms. Currently, because Medialytics is installed on so many different apps (it says “many” of the top downloaded iPhone apps), it has found its way on over 13 million unique devices — nearly half of the iPhones and iPod touches sold. → Read More
If you’re a developer dabbling away with the latest builds (or one of those clever dastardly gents who managed to get access to the beta firmware through other means), you’ve got an update waiting for you. Apple has just pushed iPhone OS 3.0 Beta 3 out the door. The changes seem minor, but here’s whats been noticed so far: Obligatory performance improvements MMS now works on T-Mobile in Germany, if you modify the carrier bundle Spotlight now saves the last search Spotlight search options (Want to only search apps, or everything but music?) Minor UI tweaks iPod Touches can now change the function tied to double tapping the home button It’s a small one at face value, but likely fixes a number of bugs sneaking around behind the scenes. We’ll let you know if anything else pops up. → Read More
Not all of us have room for surround sound setups in our tiny studio apartments, which we’re thinking about moving out of because they’re going to raise the rent again. And some of us just don’t want the tangle of wires to deal with. Enter the growing market of surround-sound headsets, of which it appears the first bargain bin sets are hitting the streets.
Zalman is a well-known brand, but I question the wisdom of buying a $60 headset promising six-channel analog but not mentioning any qualifications from Dolby, THX, or what have you. That and it’s gigantic. → Read More
So far this year I’ve has run roundtable meetup events for startups in Barcelona, Paris, Prague and coming up we’ll be in Stockholm in 27 May, Berlin on 10 June and throwing a huge summer party in London on 9 July (come meet The Travelling Geeks). But next week I will be putting together a day-long conference in London as a personal project which I think is needed for the eco-system. It’s shaping up to be pretty cool. After-all, over 200 people are already coming and there are only a handful of tickets left. [UPDATE: NOW SOLD OUT - Only tickets to the evening party still available] Geek ‘n Rolla – the day for European startups old and new to network, learn from each other, meet investors and party – will have a full day of speakers, startup pitches and will also have a dedicated exhibition area. Get your ticket today. The event will be from 10am, all day at RIBA (Royal Institute of British Architects), 66, Portland Place, London, W1B 1AD. Map Geek ’n Rolla is sponsored by Viadeo one of the largest professional social networks in the world, and supported by UK Trade and Investment, as well as NESTA, the National Endowment for Science, Technology & the Arts. And not only will we be having a great day of fantastic content for tech startups, we are planning the mother of all evening networking parties at one of London’s premier venues, Cafe de Paris kindly sponsored by Winston & Strawn’s Bootlaw. What’s there left to say? Just this. Are you Old School, or New School? You see, people ask the question, what’s a real Geek ‘n Rolla? And I tell ‘em: We all like a bit of the good life. Some the money, or the fame. But a real Geek’n Rolla – wants the lot. Sponsors We still have a few sponsorship opportunities and there will be a dedicated exhibition area available for companies to show off their products. If you are interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at the event, please contact Petra Johansson on petra[at]twistedtree.co.uk Viadeo Founded in June 2004, Viadeo quickly established itself as the place to be for professional networking in Europe and beyond. Since then, with more than 7 million members (as of January 2009). Follow them on Twitter @viadeo. Viadeo is essential for those who want to: • Increase their business opportunities (to discover → Read More
Microsoft mice are coming out like machine gun bullets! Well, not really, but we reviewed the chunky X5 back in September, the sweet and wireless but cloth-mouse-pad-intolerant X8 last month, and in between them we had the X6 keyboard. The newest gear from Microsoft’s new lineup is the X3, a smaller and less expensive version of their other Sidewinder mice. → Read More
San Francisco, CA
