We’ve talked about online ad server OpenX quite a bit in the past, and for good reason. The company, formerly known as Openads, is led by former AOL CEO Jonathan Miller (Chairman) and ex-Yahoo exec Tim Cadogan (CEO) and has in the past shown it’s serious about growing fast and making money in the process.
More recently, we covered the launch of OpenX Market, an alternative online ad exchange platform operated by the Pasadena, CA-based company.
Today, OpenX is announcing that it has raised a Series C venture capital round to the tune of $10 million, which brings the total of funding raised by the company to a healthy $30+ million. → Read More
This was supposed to be a glorious day for mobile phone giant Nokia. The Finnish company got out-innovated by Apple a couple of years ago with the introduction and subsequent success of the iPhone and the iTunes App Store, and has been desperately trying to catch up with Cupertino’s disruptive initiatives ever since by launching a couple of new devices on one hand, and consolidating its software & services business on the other hand.
Today sees the worldwide roll-out of Nokia’s Ovi Store, the company’s response to Apple’s App Store (and other centralized content stores for mobile phones and OS’es), and no doubt the company is watching the launch unfold on a global scale with watchful eyes. Here’s the thing: the launch is an utter disaster and I assume (hope) Nokia executives are outraged with the way things are going.
Update: the Ovi team posted a response to the recurring problems, see below. → Read More
Nokia’s very own central application marketplace, dubbed Ovi Store, today officially made its way to the public arena as we expected.
We’ve browsed the online store extensively and hand-picked 10 applications we think you should download and install first. Note that the available content you can download depends on which device you’re using, we’ve selected the option ‘any phone’ to increase the chances of these being available for you as well:
(after the jump) → Read More
When news broke earlier that Twitter was working with some Hollywood types to develop a television series, the web nearly imploded on itself. Some assumed that the show would be about the people behind the scenes at Twitter, some thought they may have a chance to be on television because they use Twitter, some were outraged that Twitter would make a TV show rather than improving their own service, some thought it was Twitter openly endorsing the stalking of celebrities, most thought it was odd, to say the least. So Twitter co-founder Biz Stone weighed in to clarify a bit.
It’s simple really: Twitter has signed an agreement with a production company to allow them to develop a show based around the service. Stone was vague when it comes to specifics, but it reads like Twitter will have little if anything to do with the show, and really will just lend its name and likeness (perhaps even in the title). It’s similar to what the company has done in the past with Current (for Hack the Debate) and CNN (for its various shows that heavily use the service). And it’s similar to other projects that are in the works with a few other networks. But it’s still quite interesting for a few reasons. → Read More
Smashwords, an online Ebook store for independent authors and their publishers, is launching a new affiliate program that will allow external sites to generate revenue by linking to Ebooks that are being sold on the Smashwords store.
Affiliate programs for bookstores are nothing new. Typically online publishers will link to a book and will get a cut of the proceeds if the store linked to makes a sale within a certain timeframe. But the emergence of Ebooks is changing the landscape. Amazon, which has built up its affiliate program for traditional books over the last decade, does not give affiliate publishers any portion of the purchase price if a visitor winds up buying an electronic book. Smashwords is looking to capitalize on this omission by offering web publishers an alternative. → Read More
Why this hasn’t been done before is a mystery to me. This little hack project by Kellbot of NYCResistor takes a rolling ball, an optical mouse, a gutted PS2 controller, and some Arduino hacking and makes it into a working (and awesome) virtual Katamari. Why didn’t they have special controllers like this that came with the game? It makes so much sense!
Video or it didn’t happen. Oh, video is inside! What now, boyee? → Read More
One of the side effects of Twitter’s 140-character limitation is that users are coming up with their own microsyntax and abbreviated Twitter grammar to make their Tweets more expressive. If your are merely retweeting someone else’s tweet, for example, you acknowledge that by placing a “RT” at the beginning of your micro-message. If you are replying publicly to another user or just referring to them, you indicate that with an “@username.” You can even add hashtags to a tweet so that it shows up in searches for specific topics (please use “#twittergrammar” if you are going to RT this post).
New conventions pop up every day. To make sense of them, and develop new ones, Stowe Boyd is launching Microsyntax.org tomorrow. In a debut blog post, he insists that it is not a “standards body,” but that is effectively what it might become. And we need one, because Twitter isn’t setting any standards. You can follow @microsyntax to keep on top of the latest Twitter lingo. → Read More
As YouTube and Twitter have become essential marketing tools for brands and companies, there has been an emergence of startups that help marketers track the buzz around a certain individual or brand. Radian6, Visible Measures, Omgili, Omniture and a plethora of others offer tools to monitor blogs, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and other social media sites for mentions of a company or individual’s name. Startup Viralheat is entering this space with the private beta launch of its affordable social media measurement product that scours social video sites including YouTube, Hulu and Vimeo, and Twitter to deliver real-time results of consumer generated content on these sites.
Viralheat allows you to create profiles to track an individual’s name or a company’s name across nearly 30 video sites and Twitter. The platform’s Twitter tool provides data on how many total mentions an item had on Twitter for the week and for the given day, the most active Twitter user who has Tweet about a brand, the most common language of Tweets, percentage of Tweets about a brand that are Retweets, the most active day of the week for mention of a brand and a sentiment breakdown of Tweets. For example, a profile created for “Obama” shows there were just over 7,000 tweets today including the name “Obama,” and over 32,000 total Tweets this week. The service also provides a graph of the number of Tweets over the past week and shows the most recent Tweets about the item updated in real-time, which you can Tweet out directly from Viralheat’s platform or email to others. → Read More
We’ve seen teaser after teaser, but the full trailer is finally here for Modern Warfare 2 and looks amazing. Watch it in HD, too. This game is going to rock. Hard. → Read More
It’s not a bad joke, Twitter is apparently somehow involved in a new TV show. Among other things, this earns it our rarely used “WTF” in sign language image.
Twitter has not yet responded to an email, but investor Fred Wilson seems to think it’s a good idea, saying “TV isn’t TV anymore. It’s just the largest screen in the house.”
So we’ll wait for more details of the show to surface before we write the inevitable blog post trashing the idea. In the meantime, Twitter, as a heavy user there are a nearly unlimited number of things I’d so much rather you guys spend your time on than going Hollywood. Here’s a few key ones, I’m guess lots more will show up in the comments and we’ll get to at least 300 or so things Twitter could better spend its time. → Read More
Got an hankering to install OS X on your netbook? Rob over at Boing Boing Gadgets just added a few more machines to his compatability chart, which should ensure full OS X workability. The last thing you would want is to buy a new netbook, install OS X, and not have WiFi. Or video! Oh noes! → Read More
As YouTube and Twitter have become essential marketing tools for brands and companies, there has been an emergence of startups that help marketers track the buzz around a certain individual or brand. Radian6, Visible Measures, Omgili, Omniture and a plethora of others offer tools to monitor blogs, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and other social media sites for mentions of a company or individual’s name. Startup Viralheat is entering this space with the private beta launch of its affordable social media measurement product that scours social video sites including YouTube, Hulu and Vimeo, and Twitter to deliver real-time results of consumer generated content on these sites.
Viralheat allows you to create profiles to track an individual’s name or a company’s name across nearly 30 video sites and Twitter. The platform’s Twitter tool provides data on how many total mentions an item had on Twitter for the week and for the given day, the most active Twitter user who has Tweet about a brand, the most common language of Tweets, percentage of Tweets about a brand that are Retweets, the most active day of the week for mention of a brand and a sentiment breakdown of Tweets. For example, a profile created for “Obama” shows there were just over 7,000 tweets today including the name “Obama,” and over 32,000 total Tweets this week. The service also provides a graph of the number of Tweets over the past week and shows the most recent Tweets about the item updated in real-time, which you can Tweet out directly from Viralheat’s platform or email to others. → Read More
Swedish developer A Different Game announced today that the DSi will soon aid ghost hunters on their quest to vanquish and/or send back the ethereal to the underworld. Ghostwire will utilize the DSi’s camera and mic to help you hunt down the ghosts haunting us all and determine why they’re still creeping around our plane of existence. → Read More
The world of nettops is a strange one, my friends. What are they for? Where do they go? Where do they come from? I don’t know the answers to these questions, but the fact is there are computers out there that are just as at home in the kitchen as in the office. And now one of them is from Lenovo. Obviously they’re loving that Intel sauce, because this IdeaCentre C300 is filled with Atom-y goodness — and so is the S12 12-inch laptop, which sports an Ion setup inside. → Read More
Artist Jorge Colombo drew this entire New Yorker cover using Brushes for the iPhone, a $4.99 drawing app.
He recorded the entire process using Brushes Viewer, offering us a glimpse into the future of touch-screen art reproduced on the cover of a print magazine. → Read More
Yesterday developer Rick Strom wrote a blog posted titled “The Incredible App Store Hype“, in which he detailed some of the revenue stats he was seeing from the iPhone applications that he had released (some of which rank on the App Store’s top apps lists), and what other developers could expect to make accordingly. His conclusion? That most of the 36,000 applications on the App Store aren’t selling at all – for many apps, most days go by without a single sale.
Surprised? You shouldn’t be.
As marketplaces go, the App Store has a very low barrier to entry that makes it easy for anyone to sell their wares, which means that it’s flooded with apps. There’s no way Apple could prominently present these 36,000 applications to users without overwhelming them, which means most apps fall into obscurity as soon as they’re submitted. If you can’t find a way to get the word out, nobody is going to find your app on their own. → Read More
After we broke the story of the Palm Eos’ existence back in April, the information came pouring in. Alas, one thing that no one could seem to nail was a release date. → Read More
AT&T is playing with black magic, and some of its closest ties may get burned. AT&T will be launching the HTC “Lancaster”, powered by Google’s Android platform, making its way to retail stores in August of this year. Having AT&T’s first Android-powered device being released soon looks like this isn’t something that AT&T is setting on its back burners. This may be mildly damaging to Apple as they’re working on contracts and negotiations with AT&T for continued exclusive support for the iPhone. So is this AT&T’s way of showing Apple that it hasn’t become a one-trick pony, relying largely on the success and popularity of the iPhone? → Read More
How many of you modeled your Xbox 360 avatar after yourself? Plenty of you, I’m sure. Not me, no. (Gotta be different.) My avatar, picture here, is named—yes, he has a name—Detective Bashyourbrainsin. He’s my idea of a rogue 1970s New York City police officer. → Read More
