We were totally jealous of that random dude that spotted the Samsung NX-10 at some random Korean trade show over the summer. Oh how we hated him. But many months later, we finally have a good look at the heavily-rumored Samsung NX-10. Too bad we don’t have any info on it. That will probably come at CES. → Read More
[Ireland] Ireland-based LouderVoice, the reviews service and aggregator, has bagged its first US customer, audio specialist Klipsch.
The American company is using LouderVoice’s widget to add user reviews to its site, the first time that they’ve moved away from relying solely on “professional reviews” written in the home audio and gadget press to provide feedback and recommendations.
User reviews don’t just appear on Klipsch’s own site but are also aggregated on LouderVoice.com, which helps with SEO, and accessible through the Irish startup’s Android app.
LouderVoice thinks it’s seeing a trend here too. The recession is forcing businesses to focus on listening to their customers more, says the startup, and to seek out cost effective ways to drive direct sales to their respective sites and cut out any middle person in the process. → Read More
Oh, look, I’m taking a single remark from a lengthy interview and making an entire post about it. It concerns Blizzard, the famed developer of World of Warcraft and Diablo. You may think of Blizzard as a PC developer, but that ignores games like The Lost Vikings. Anyhow, Blizzard has said in an interview with Gamasutra, which always does good stuff, that it is not averse to making a console game in the future, just that it needs to be the right game. → Read More
Facebook has just released its list of top status updates for the year, and they’re pretty interesting. This is a new feature that Facebook plans to release yearly called “Memology,” the study of how memes are spreading on Facebook. Specifically, the Facebook Data Team looked at status updates in the U.S. for this year’s list.
For this list, Facebook grouped together similar items to make it a more comprehensive one. As such, the first item on the list should be a surprise to no one: “Facebook Applications.” The specific words that Facebook grouped together here include Farmville, Farm Town, and Social Living, they note. The fact that Farmville has 72 million month active users who update their statuses with info from the game was probably enough to give Faceboook Applications the top spot. → Read More
For a long time, Meebo has been a widely liked company with lots of funding but a fairly small amount of revenue. This year, that started to change. The company’s Meebo Bar (AKA Community IM) has now been deployed to over a hundred major sites and has helped Meebo reach nearly 100 million unique visitors monthly. And today, it’s launching a feature that will see that number take a huge jump: a self-serve tool for implementing the Meebo Bar yourself. Last week I spoke with CEO Seth Sternberg about Meebo’s recent growth, the impact of the new self-serve tool, and how he sees Meebo’s outlook over the next year.
Sternberg says that Meebo started 2009 with around 30 million uniques, almost all of which came from the site’s chat portal at Meebo.com. The Meebo Bar has added nearly 70 million more visitors in one year. The product was originally announced back in July 2008, and launched late that year on Flixster. Since then, it’s been deployed to 130 partner sites, with 150 more contracted partners ready to deploy it in the near future. → Read More
Etsy founder Rob Kalin will be taking over the reins as CEO once again in January, 2010, he writes in a blog post. Etsy’s current CEO, Maria Thomas, will be leaving the company. Thomas was brought on as CEO in mid-2008 from NPR (where she headed up its digital efforts), and helped grow the marketplace for hand-crafted goods.
The comScore chart indicates that it’s been on a bit of a tear lately, with 3.4 million unique U.S. visitors in November, 2009, up from 1.7 million a year ago. The company says the site is getting 11 million visitors a month worldwide.
It’s not clear how much those visitors bought on the site, but Kalin also discloses for the first time that the company is profitable. Perhaps Thomas was brought in for adult supervision while Kalin, who is young, was learning the ropes. I asked Kalin if he is looking for another CEO, and he responded via email, “I’ll be CEO as long as it’s good for Etsy.” If he’s in it for the long haul, as he appears to be, now’s a good time to transition back into the CEO role. → Read More
Earlier today, we wrote about Google forgoing its usual holiday gifts to its ad partners and instead giving $20 million to a group of charities. Now it looks like Facebook is doing something similar. In an email sent out to various friends and members of the press, Facebook’s Communications and Policy team notes that rather than having a holiday party this year, it is giving out $25 virtual tokens that you can use for a donation.
Here’s what the message says, “In lieu of a party this season, we are making a $25 donation on your behalf to U.S. classrooms in need. Please go to DonorsChoose.org, enter the code in the token above, and select a project to support.” Again, a nice gesture from a one of the big Silicon Valley players. And certainly better than yet another holiday party (there is seriously one just about every night out here right now). → Read More
Outside of a completely simulated appearance in a commercial, we’ve been hard-pressed in finding any video of the LG eXpo’s projector attachment in action. We expected to see some hit the Tubes after the handset launched last week – alas, the projector accessory still hasn’t hit the shelves.
Fortunately, the guys over at MobileSyrup have managed to scrounge one up north of the border. → Read More
Dell’s line of Mini 10 netbooks will be getting a few boosts here and there sometime next month. For starters, you’ll be able to get one outfitted with an Atom N450 CPU at 1.66GHz. The six-cell battery option will apparently provide up to 9.5 hours of battery life as well. → Read More
Twitter Search is great — except when 99.9% of the results are from people you could care less about. While Twitter has been working on relevancy, one easy fix that should have been in place a while ago is just a way to search the tweets of the people you follow. Before FriendFeed more or less died post-Facebook sale, it offered such a feature with its search. Now a new service, Flocking.me, brings the same thing to Twitter.
Flocking.me works exactly as you’d expect. Once you authenticate yourself via OAuth, you’re taken to your customized Flocking.me screen where the tweets of the people you follow are displayed. Front and center is a big search box where you can search and yes, it will return results of just the people you follow. Better still, you can change the view of the results from straight stream, to stacks of tweets to fit more on the screen. And you can even turn on a map view to see where those tweets originated from. You can also filter search further using your Twitter Lists. → Read More
Man, that was a surreal headline to write. Two baked goods in one sentence, and we’re not even talking about Android. With over 10 million units pushed, the Cookie is LG’s best selling device ever. It should come as no surprise, then, that it’s getting a sequel. → Read More
We’ve gathered more information on a recent Facebook common stock purchase by DST. The original share buyback was oversubscribed at a $14.77 per share price (roughly $6.5 billion valuation). This most recent sales were done at $25/share, which values Facebook at roughly $11 billion.
That’s not a big jump from Facebook’s $10 billion valuation earlier this year. But that sale was done in preferred stock, which isn’t tied directly to the price of common stock that employees get (that’s why startup employees are able to get stock options at prices far below the recent venture capital valuations). This new sale at $11 billion means new option grants to Facebook employees will almost certainly need to be priced at least at $25/share.
So why is Facebook allowing these sales? They have to. This transaction was initiated by a third party and was going to be run through Second Market. When common holders indicated they wanted to sell, Facebook had to let the sale happen or exercise a right of first refusal. They exercised that right, and have brought in DST to complete the sale. → Read More
There are a plethora of iPhone app directories and platforms that try to make sense of the 100,000 apps in the App Store ecosystem. We’ve recently written about Appolicious, Chorus, and others that have customized app directory and recommendations services. Now, directories are beginning to incorporate Android app directories into their platforms. Mplayit, which recently launched a comprehensive iPhone app discovery directory within a Facebook app, is rolling out a catalog of the over 16,000 Android applications on the social network.
Similar to its iPhone app directory, Mplayit’s directory of Android apps includes a dedicated page for each app where Mplayit will post videos of the app (created either by the developer or pulled from YouTube), a detailed description of the app and reviews. You can also click to buy the app from the Android Market. → Read More
Many social networks these days offer some sort of instant messaging chatting element. The problem is that people are already chatting on a half dozen other services throughout the day. Justin.tv is launching a way to tie some of the big ones together on its site.
Its new unified chat option launching today allows users to pull their Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter conversations into Justin.tv. These are then all displayed in a single chat window that resides on the right hand side of the page. → Read More
Ford is set to announce the next version of SYNC at CES this year, but an interesting feature leaked early. Apparently SYNC 3.0 will play nicely with USB modems and turn the car into a rolling Wi-Fi hotspot. The official announced hasn’t been release just yet so keep in mind a key detail my be missing, but so far we like it. This solution is dramatically more versatile and consumer-friendly than the dedicated Autonet other manufacturers have been turning too. → Read More
Unlike here in the States, the iPhone exclusivity deal for the UK wasn’t a big pile of absurd. O2 got exclusivity for 2 years. Once that was up, it was an open game where just about any carrier was free to hop on the iPhone – and hop they have. Looking to stay competitive with the likes of O2 and Orange UK, Vodafone has just officially confirmed that they’ll be launching the iPhone on January 14th of 2010. £35 a month will get you a free 8GB 3G, while a 32GB 3GS will set you back an additional £239 up front. [BBC via EngMo] → Read More
Each year, Google sends out gifts to its users of its AdSense and AdWords products. Typically, these gifts are only given to the “high-rollers” on each in early December. But this year, these gifts were nowhere to be found, and it appears that today has revealed the reason. It looks like Google has sent out a message to all AdSense and AdWords partners letting them know that they’ve decided to do “something a little different this year.” Clicking on the link in the email takes you to a page letting you know that Google is giving $20 million to a group of charity as its holiday gift to everyone this year.
Specifically, the website reads, “This gift is for someone very special: Everyone. Because charities are experiencing their toughest year in decades, we have committed $20 million to helping those who help us all. Our gift to you is a gift to them. Happy Holidays.” It then goes on to list the 25 charities that Google has chosen as “intended recipients.” These include: Boys and Girls Clubs, Feeding America, Smile Train, HEAL Africa, Loud Against Nazis, Reporters Without Borders, and many others. → Read More
[UK] Vodafone will bring the iPhone 3G and 3GS to its UK network from January 14. You can pre-order the iPhone from today, with the 8GB iPhone 3G free on a £35 post paid plan. There will be unlimited texts on consumer price plans or unlimited calls to landlines for businesses.
Vodafone says it’s been preparing its network for “over a year” for the likely assault on its data networks.
However, iPhone customers will be offered up to 1GB of mobile data as part of their price plans – which contrasts with O2′s unlimited data plans.
Customers will also be able to use BT Openzone Wi-Fi networks. → Read More
San Francisco, CA
