Since leaving Google last October, former product manager and Jaiku co-founder, Jyri Engeström has moved his young family back to Helsinki and started rooting around for the next thing. Aside from working on his wife Ula’s long term project to create a hyperlink for any physical object, Thinglink, he’s also been seeking angel investments.
Today he joins the board of XIHA Life which is run out of Sunnyvale, California, Switzerland and Finland. At the same time the startup has announced a $1 million seed round. Veraventure led the round, joined by other angels and the company founders. Jani Penttinen, XIHA Life co-founder and CEO, says the money will be used to push the mobile platform and international growth. → Read More
Acer has big plans for 2010. Sometime within the coming months the world’s second largest computer maker will launch a 6-inch monochrome ebook reader, cross-platform application store and a Chrome OS netbook — along with probably a crapton and a half of computers under its Acer, Gateway, and EMachines brands. And yes, the company is working on a tablet computer says the president of Acer’s IT Products division. Tablet! → Read More
PC users, rejoice, for Google has just announced that there’s a fresh, stable release of Google Chrome for Windows, with added extensions and bookmark sync features.
You can check for the new version manually if you’re already using Google Chrome for Windows (go to Settings > About Google Chrome), or you can wait for the new release to be automatically updated within the next week. → Read More
Bill Gates has released his second annual letter from the Bill And Melinda Gates Foundation, and he has highlighted a tech startup that he finds particularly compelling, Academic Earth. We’ve written about the online video education site, which is sort of like a Hulu For Education.The startup provides a user-friendly platform for educational video that offers courses and lectures from Yale, MIT, Harvard, Stanford, UC Berkeley, Princeton and others.
Gates believes that online learning sites like Academic Earth will revolutionize education. Gates writes that sites that can cater to individual students online, offering a personalized learning experience, are innovative and will take interactivity to a new level. Academic Earth has received considerable amount of acclaim since its launch last year, also being named one of Time Magazine’s best websites of 2009. → Read More
In a savvy move, SoundCloud are to partner with music portal The Hype Machine to let labels and artists service music bloggers – a key component of the music scene now – with new and pre-release tracks.
The Hype Machine is going to be able to aggregate the output of blogs, but more importantly the bloggers get official releases without having to be forced to release an MP3 into the wild. In addition labels/artists can track listens and pull analytics on who and how the content is being consumed, as tracks get released. Since labels and bloggers haven’t traditionally got on, this move is potentially a lot more productive for both sides. → Read More
News Corp-owned HarperCollins this morning put out a release about the launch of Inkpop.com, an interactive writing platform for teens. Which caught us off guard, because the U.S. publisher had already soft-launched the website on its Authonomy blog on November 24, 2009.
Anyway: Inkpop is a project from HarperTeen, HarperCollins Publishers’ teen publishing unit. The platform aims to attract young readers and writers with a combination of community publishing features, user-generated content, and social networking elements. → Read More
Seeing the success of Farmville and other social games, Break Media is getting into gaming across its roster of men-oriented video sites. The first game, MMA FightPicker, is launching today on Break’s martial-arts video site, CagePotato. It is a pretty basic fantasy sports game where you pick a line-up of fighters and get points, in the form of potato chips, every time your fighters win. The potato chips also act as a virtual currency, which can be used to advance within the game. Every time you play, you get some potato chips, but you can also buy them.
MMA FightPicker is Break’s first game, unless you count the Tiger Woods game where he is chased by his wife. It is just the first of many games the company plans to roll out across its eight sites, including its flagship Break.com. The games are being developed by a new game studio in Shanghai, China that already employs more than three dozen developers who are ready to churn out a variety of games. “We started this studio so we could knock out social games across our properties,” says CEO Keith Richman. → Read More
Mimecast, a startup that offers a email archiving, continuity, and security software has raised $21 million in Series B financing from Index Ventures and Dawn Capital.
Founded in the UK in 2003 by Peter Bauer and Neil Murray, Mimecast’s cloud based platform extends the capabilities of most in-house email systems by integrating additional storage, archiving, and spam/virus protection. For example, the software could exchange the value of Microsoft Outlook’s email platforms. Mimecast currently has close to 2,500 customers across a range of of industries including financial services, legal, manufacturing and the public sector. The startup claims to have seen triple digit revenue growth in each of the last three years. → Read More
Convio, an Austin, Texas-based provider of on-demand solutions that enable nonprofit organizations to manage online fundraising and other activities, has announced that it has filed a registration statement on Form S-1 with the SEC relating to a proposed initial public offering of its common stock.
The shares in the offering will be offered by Convio and certain stockholders. While the number of shares to be offered and the price range have not been determined, the Wall Street Journal reports (behind paywall) that the sale is estimated to entail $57.5 million in stock. → Read More
We’ve written several times about Israeli startup NuConomy’s compelling analytics offerings that aim to help publishers, advertisers and users better understand and engage with the social web. The platform’s software continually monitors every aspect of a site’s traffic and user behaviors and highlights the most important things for companies to act on in realtime. We are told by a reliable source that NuConomy is being acquired by public company LivePerson, which is an online marketplace for expert advice and information. We hear the acquisition price is around $3 million, which is about the same amount investors put into the company. Israeli news site The Marker wrote about the rumored acquisition here (the article is in Hebrew).
Founded in 2006 in Israel, NuConomy raised a $300k seed round in April 2007 from Yossi Vardi, Shlomo Nehama and Uzi Tzuker, and later completed a Series A Round financing in 2008 from WPP Group (the company has since relocated its headquarters to San Francisco). We hear that advertising giant WPP was in negotiations to acquire the startup but the deal fell through. Unfortunately, with the $3 million pricetag, it doesn’t look like NuConomy’s investors made any money. → Read More
Japan-based Bird Electron has announced [JP] the Ezison 100 today, a quite unusual speaker for the iPhone (or iPod touch) that’s supposed to turn those devices into some kind of electric guitar. The Ezison 100 is (hand)made in Japan, with Bird Electron saying they used mainly wood and acrylic fiber in the production process. → Read More
Menlo Park, CA-based Mayfield Fund, founded over 40 years ago, has officially announced the expansion of its team with two noteworthy Entrepreneurs-in-Residence (EIRs): Sean Moriarty and Rajeev Chawla.
Moriarty is the former CEO and President of Ticketmaster who recently joined Eventbrite as a director. Rajeev Chawla founded and is the former President & CEO of NeoPath Networks, which was acquired by Cisco Systems in March 2007. → Read More
StockTwits, a real time platform for the sharing of information around financial markets, has made it’s second acquisition – a financial news site called Abnormal Returns, founded by Tadas Viskanta. This follows the acquisition of Chart.ly last year.
Abnormal Returns is a small but influential financial news site that includes curated news as well as original content about the financial markets and stocks. StockTwits is taking that platform and adding its real time news and information feed from the StockTwits network. You can see the new feed on the right side of the Abnormal Returns site.
Viskanta will become a StockTwits employee and will continue to manage the Abnormal Returns website and service. → Read More
TwitJobSearch, a Twitter-based job search engine, has teamed up with TweetDeck to offer a desktop client dubbed JobDeck, as reported by Clickz earlier this morning.
The application indexes tweets related to recruitment from across the Twittersphere, in real-time, based on TwitterJobSearch’s algorithm (our earlier coverage). → Read More
When I interviewed Dan Abrams last year about his new media news and analysis blog, Mediaite, he indicated that he has ambitions of building a Mediaite mini-empire by expanding to other verticals. Abrams announced late last year that he has a definitive plan for this, with sister Mediaite sites covering style and fashion, sports and technology. Today, Abrams’ venture into tech news and analysis, Geekosystem, has launched.
Geekosystem aims to cover what Abrams calls “geek culture,” which includes tech news, movies, science fiction, video games, superheroes in comics, and more. The audience is all those “nerd” who don’t necessarily work in technology or have a deep understand of the industry, but want to catch up on the latest trends and news. → Read More
Lots of announcements from AOL this morning: the company has acquired Internet video company StudioNow in a deal valued at $36.5 million in cash and stock, with a portion of the cash paid out over multiple years. In addition, AOL decided to confirm the news we broke last week about CTO Ted Cahall leaving the company, after vehemently denying it up until now.
Finally, AOL has hired Microsoft and Google vet Jeff Reynar as Head of Technology for Engineering and Products in New York. Reynar will build out and manage AOL’s New York Technology Center and will focus on innovation for AOL’s content business and lead the company’s engineering efforts in New York. → Read More
Chicago-based ExteNet Systems, which designs, builds and operates network infrastructure, has received $128 million from SSP Offshore, SBA Communications, Centennial Ventures, Columbia Capital, Sevin Rosen Funds, CenterPoint Ventures and Palomar Ventures. This brings the starup’s total funding to over $150 million.
ExteNet’s fiber network infrastructure are widely implemented by wireless service providers. The company promises providers with the ability to expand coverage to hard to reach spots.The new funding will support further development of infrastructure for wireless service providers. → Read More
[France] Music search and discovering service Deezer is currently caught up in a storm of controversy: its co-founder and CEO Jonathan Benassaya has effectively been forced out by his investors. After Deezer faced mounting competition from services like Spotify, it’s emerged that investors ousted the founder in order to put in place a more experienced business manager to both reorganize and perhaps prepare some kind of exit. They’ve been disappointed with Deezer’s performance towards a premium service and low advertising revenues.
The rumour that this was about to happen began last week grew a head of steam over the weekend, as reported by music expert Philippe Astor on French site Electronlibre (Google translation). Midem, the annual conference for the music industry, is currently taking place in Cannes, France and the departure of Jonathan Bessaya from Deezer was one of the buzzing topics during the weekend. One of the things that confirmed this rumour was that the CEO was due to participate on a panel on Saturday during Midemnet (the part of Midem focused on the online music industry) but he conspicuously did not show up. His name was even up on screen during the panel he was supposed to attend. On this panel was also Paul Brown, SVP of Spotify, that is widely regarded as a Deezer killer. → Read More
I’ve been quite fascinated by electric car firm Better Place since I read up on how the company was founded by former SAP executive Shai Agassi in the excellent book ‘Start-up Nation’, which tells of Israel’s historical entrepreneurial DNA and tech success stories.
Basically, Better Place aims to reduce global dependency on petroleum through the creation of a market-based transportation infrastructure that supports electric vehicles, relying on renewable energy from solar arrays and wind farms instead of oil. The startup, founded just 2 years ago, is currently building its first electric vehicle network in Israel, and plans to deploy the infrastructure in other nations on a country-by-country basis with initial deployments beginning this year, and commercial sales beginning in 2012.
As of April 2009, it had already raised $400 million, with several countries offering tax breaks in favor of the ambitious venture. This morning, Better Place announced that it has raised a massive $350 million follow-up venture funding round to lay the groundwork for these deployments, valuing the company at a whopping $1.25 billion. → Read More
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