Toronto-based BlueCat Networks, a provider of enterprise IP management solutions, has raised $11 million in its first round of institutional financing led by Menlo Park, CA-based firm Bridgescale Partners.
BlueCat caters to network administrators who face a variety of IP-related pressures like the introduction of VoIP networks, wireless devices (including RFID tags), virtualization, and the complexity IPv6 brings to company networks by offering automated solutions that simplify network processes. → Read More
Let me catch you up. Late yesterday afternoon, a report surfaced that claimed Nintendo will launch a 4-inch DSi in Japan before the end of the year. Sounds good, right? Well, Nintendo has responded to the claims. → Read More
Jon Steinberg, now former Strategic Partner Development Manager on Google’s SMB (Small Medium Business) Partnerships team, has accepted a position as Executive in Residence at Polaris Venture Partners. Steinberg will be working from the VC firm’s New York offices, where he’ll help identify new investment opportunities as well as working with existing portfolio companies.
The investor’s portfolio is of course listed on CrunchBase in its entirety, but the most familiar to our readers will be JibJab, Sprout, Quantcast, LogMeIn, Thing Labs (of Brizzly fame) and Automattic (parent company to WordPress). → Read More
Montreal-based StatusNet, the company behind the open-source microblogging service identi.ca, is closing an $875,000 seed round today. Investors include Montreal Startup, iNovia Capital, Fotolia co-founder Oleg Tscheltzoff, and Xavier Niel. The startup, which changed its name a few weeks ago from Control Yourself, raised a previous seed round of $150,000 from Montreal Startup in January, 2009.
StatusNet wants to become the WordPress of microblogging. It created an open-source microblogging software platform (formerly called laconi.ca, now called status.net) which anyone can download and run on their own servers. Now, it is working on a hosted version of Status.net, currently in private beta. (We have 50 invites for anyone who includes the invitation code “TC09″ on the signup page).
The bet here is that just as millions of people run their own blogs, millions of people and companies will want to run their own microblogs as well. Offering a microblogging platform as a hosted service will allow StatusNet to pursue a strategy similar to WordPress.com. It will offer the basic service for free, and then charge power-users for extras. → Read More
Remember that quick story about MSI pondering an ebook reader? Yeah, it seems it is and will be based on Nvidia’s Tegra mobile platform. According to Digitimes, the reader will sport a 9-inch grayscale screen and will be out sometime in the first half 2010. That’s all. Move along here. Nothing more to see. It’s just another ebook reader. → Read More
Pretend, for a moment, that you’re one of the creative minds at Smule; you and your team have had a series of back-to-back successes, and your audience has come to expect a certain things of you. They expect the utmost highest design quality, for it to be music-related, and — perhaps worst of all — some level of maturity. When expectations are high and narrow in focus, how are you supposed to unleash your creativity?
If you’re Smule, you go and establish a second company as your first company’s evil twin. Then you release an application involving zombies in bikinis. → Read More
If you’re a computer science graduate a year out of college, there probably isn’t a celebrity you’d be more excited about knowing than Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. So when he takes a minute to record a video with you to prove to your younger brother’s friends that you actually got a job at the company, it’s something you are pretty proud of. And the fact that Zuckerberg does this kind of thing is one of the reasons why Facebook wins. Watch the whole video with Dan Muriello here. → Read More
Do you need a streamer in your life? An HD media player? MLB, Netflix, and Amazon content? You, sir or madam, are in luck. Roku has announced the Roku SD player for $79 and added the HD and HD-XR models for $99 and $129 respectively. The Roku SD player connects to the TV using the included and familiar Yellow-Red-White video/audio cable. In addition, the Roku SD player incorporates Wi-Fi (802.11 b/g) and an Ethernet port for easy broadband connectivity. With the Roku SD player, customers can stream their favorite movies and TV shows to their TV at up to DVD quality. The Roku HD and HD-XR players feature High Definition streaming capability, connecting directly to any TV using HDMI or Component video (both products also include S-video or Composite video outputs as well). The Roku HD-XR adds the latest Wi-Fi standard, 802.11n dual-band, giving customers who have adopted this router technology improved connectivity range and better overall wireless performance between the Roku HD-XR and the home network. The Roku HD-XR also works with legacy routers and can often boost Wi-Fi range inside the house. Finally, the Roku HD-XR includes a USB port for future use. I’ve been using the old streamer for a year now and I’m pleased but I worry that this is a bit limited in scope for most users. $79 bucks for SD, though, isn’t too much to ask. → Read More
Pioneer has showcased the Floating Vision at the Digital Contents Expo in Tokyo (that ended Sunday), another 3D display that doesn’t require you to wear glasses (yawn) to view 3D images. It’s not bad at all though, even though visitors flocked to Sony’s booth to see their stereoscopic 3D display (which was a bit cooler).
You can connect the Floating Vision to a PC via USB 2.0 to view images or videos “floating” over the display (5.7 inches, 640 × 480 VGA resolution). What’s pretty cool is that you can “interact” with the image, as the device detects your hand movements. It’s also possible to “control” an image with your voice (the device has a mic on its front). Both Windows PCs and Macs are supported. → Read More
Just so everyone knows, there’s a Woot! Off going on right now. Perfect timing too as it’s just before the holiday shopping season. So load up Woot! in a dedicated tab, sit back, and enjoy the ride for the next day or so. → Read More
Amazon has launched a hosted relational database service, Amazon RDS, as part of the suite of services available at AWS. The new service is a hosted MySQL database instance with the full capabilities and access rights as a normal self-hosted DB. As a hosted solution, instances are easily created and available almost immediately. Pricing stars at $0.11c per hour for the smallest scale specification, and is available now on the AWS site.
Unlike completely elastic hosted DB services, which abstract a large-scale cluster into a shared environment for customers, the Amazon model is to step up or down through tiers of service based on requirements. The tiers of service (with names that seem to be inspired by a fast food restaurant menu) and pricing are: → Read More
T-Mobile jumps feet first into the no-contract, unlimited everything arena with its new “Even More Plus” plans, ranging from $30 per month for 500 voice minutes to $80 per month for unlimited voice minutes, text messages, and internet access. Family plans are also available for between $50 and $140 per month. → Read More
Cisco has added another company to its coffers with the acquisition of ScanSafe for $183 million. A few weeks ago, Cisco announced a $2.9 billion acquisition of mobile networking infrastructure provider Starent Networks, which followed the $3 billion acquisition of video video-conferencing company Tandberg in late September.
ScanSafe provides software-as- a-service (SaaS) Web security solutions for large and small businesses. Tom Gillis, Ciscos’s VP and general manager of its security technology business unit, said in the release that the acquisition would help further Cisco’s vision “to build a borderless network security architecture that combines network and cloud-based services.” ScanSafe’s service will be integrated with Cisco’s AnyConnect VPN Client, a virtual private network (VPN) product to offer a cloud-security service. → Read More
Browser maker Opera has released its latest ‘State of the Mobile Web’ report this morning, claiming that there was a huge surge in mobile web usage past September.
Last month, more than 35.6 million people used Opera Mini (which is now serving over 500 million pageviews per day on average on a wide range of mobile devices), up 11.5% compared to August 2009 and more than 150% compared to September 2008. The Norway software developer also claims more than 2 petabytes of data is now processed by its servers on a monthly basis. That’d be 2,000 terabytes. → Read More
Tire maker Bridgestone isn’t the first company that comes to mind when thinking about electronic paper, but the company has been experimenting in this field for quite some time now. Today, Bridgestone claimed that it has developed the world’s first flexible e-book reader [JP]. The device, which is pictured above, uses electronic paper (instead of, say, an LCD) and will display the content on the screen even after you turn it off. → Read More
Reality Digital, a provider of white-label social media platforms for brands, is introducing a new spin-off service today called Spotlight. With the new offering, the company makes its entry into the market of online video management and distribution platforms.
This is growing into quite a saturated field with players like Ooyala, Brightcove, MIG69 and Swarmcast fighting hard for pieces of the pie. → Read More
Streaming music startup Spotify has confirmed that its CTO has left, effective today. Andreas Ehn tweeted about his departure this morning, in a move which has taken observers by surprise. The company is currently prepping a big launch in the U.S., a watershed which would normally suggest that this is a moment to have all hands on deck. Losing your CTO right now is probably not the best timing, to put it mildly.
However, a Spotify spokesperson has told me that they’d “like to thank Andreas for all his brilliant work” and “everybody at Spotify wishes him well in the future as he seeks out new and, no doubt, extraordinarily complex challenges!” I’m sure this isn’t meant to sound back-handed but Ehn’s tweets paint a slightly less rosy picture. → Read More
Tomorrow at the eComm Europe 2009 event, Brussels-based provider of international VoIP origination services and telephone numbers Voxbone will be officially announcing that its global phone number service iNum now supports high-definition voice calling between Skype (which now boasts over 521 million users worldwide) and dozens of VoIP networks.
Voxbone will be transcoding between Skype’s wideband SILK codec and the HD codec G.722, with support for additional codes planned for the future. → Read More
On the heels of its recent acquisitions of microtransaction platforms Twofish and N-Cash, Live Gamer, an online marketplace for players to trade and buy video game virtual goods, is seeing success in managing virtual economies for online games, virtual worlds and social networks. In conjunction with game makers, Live Gamer’s platform lets online game players trade virtual goods they earn in games. The company is using Twofish and N-Cash’s micropayments technologies to power commerce in these gaming marketplaces.
Gaming customers including Everyplay (Finland), friendscook, Fotochatter, Hangout, Hooked and Radius IM (United States), ph03nix (Canada) and GPM (Korea) are using Live Gamer’s virtual goods exchange to power an economy platform around their games. Live Gamer’s platform includes virtual currency and virtual item systems, inventory management, publisher-sponsored secondary market trading, analytics, fraud management and support features. → Read More
