It was just a few months ago that Digg dropped 10% of its staff. Now the company is making much deeper cuts – 25 employees will be laid off, a little more than 37% of Digg’s total staff.
This comes on top of news that Digg lost their chief revenue officer, Chas Edwards, earlier today.
I spoke with founder Kevin Rose and new CEO Matt Williams about the cuts earlier this morning. The company will be refocusing the Digg product, Williams says, and more announcements will be made tomorrow. → Read More
Unsurprisingly, the fourth quarter is usually the best sales period for the Kindle (and most retail outlets), but it looks like this year will be especially strong as more consumers flock to e-books. After announcing a new e-book loan feature last week, Amazon is revealing a number of new Kindle stats today in time for the holiday shopping rush. According to the company, sales of the new generation Kindle devices have already surpassed total Kindle device sales from the holiday season of last year (October through December 2009).
Amazon also said tat Kindle book unit sales continue to overtake print on Amazon.com. In the past 30 days, Amazon.com customers purchased more Kindle books than print books, which include both hardcover and paperback combined, for the top 10, 25, 100, and 1,000 bestselling books on Amazon.com. In fact, Amazon sold more than 3 times as many Kindle books in the first nine months of 2010 as in the first nine months of 2009. → Read More
For all the talk about solar, the US market for solar power still has a long way to go before it makes a real dent in the country’s overall power capacity.
On Monday morning, Bloomberg New Energy Finance, a major aggregator of green industry data released a few key projections: the US solar market is on track to grow 30x to 44 gigawatts by 2020 and could make up 4.3% of America’s total power capacity.
Of course, that path to 4.3% is not cheap. In order to get there, the US market will need to attract $100 billion in investment dollars. → Read More
Zenprise, the California, US-based provider of enterprise mobile device management software, has acquired France’s Sparus Software, which specialises in “managing, securing and remotely deploying line of business applications” in anything from smartphones, smartpads and things like card readers and scanners. The details of the acquisition aren’t being disclosed, although Sparus is thought to have previously raised over €4m from Crédit Agricole Private Equity, AXA Private Equity, and the startup’s management team, all of whom would have been seeking a decent exit. → Read More
Oh, jeez. Uefa President Michel Platini has officially come out against the use of goal-line technology. This isn’t some TV pundit or anything, this is the president of Uefa, probably the most influential regional football body on the planet! Maybe Platini will come out against the use of studs in boots, or maybe he’ll come out against the use of stadium floodlights. After all, the football gods created the Sun so that we could play during the daylight hours, right? → Read More
New Yorkers have plenty of good coffee on just about every block (Shout out to Think Coffee on Mercer!), but that doesn’t mean they don’t have a Starbucks on every other corner just like the rest of the world. If you’re a regular at the ol’ Bucks (Hey, I’m not judging. Coffee snobbery is for chumps), live in NYC, and tote an iPhone, you’ve got a new trick up your sleeve that you can use to impress the ladies/gentlemen/anyone-who-might-actually-be-impressed-by-this: paying with your phone. → Read More
The arrival of the holiday shopping season is certainly escalating the e-book wars. Today, Amazon released data showing rapid Kindle sales and Barnes and Noble is expected to release a color version of the Nook. Borders is jumping into the mix by announcing a number of deals on its assortment of e-readers in time for the holiday shopping season. For the next week, Borders is offering free shipping on online eReader orders, a $25 gift card, free eBooks, 20 percent off device accessories and more incentives for shoppers to choose Borders for the e-book gifts.
So if you purchase the Velocity Micro Cruz Tablet, which costs about $299.99, you will receive a $25 Borders gift card. Borders is also knocking $30 off the Velocity Micro Cruz Reader with WiFi to bring the price down to $169.99. The Kobo eReader, which lists for $129.99, is now priced at $99.99; and the Aluratek Libre is now $99.99 through Nov. 15. → Read More
Both Amazon and Barnes & Noble have downplayed actual e-reader device sales numbers, instead crowing about the number of ebooks sold in the past year. This is an important distinction because it shows us a few things about the Nook/Kindle audience. First, e-readers (dedicated e-readers, mind you, not tablets) are popular with heavy readers and, as a corollary, most e-reader owners buy a lot of books. However, the real value has been in the e-book format itself, as the popularity of the Kindle and Nook e-book stores can attest. Since the first e-readers trickled out of Sony in about 2006, the general audience has complained about the lack of a color option and their interest has been consistently drawn to tablets like the iPad, the Playbook, and the HP Slate. What’s an e-reader manufacturer to do?
In short, they need to create a slate with a focus on e-reading which, like the Nook, will run a kiosk-style, locked-down version of Android. A thin LCD screen (OLED is right out) should satisfy all but the most picky reader and a $250 price tag, $50 more than the best E Ink Nook, would create a fairly compelling offering for that self-same reader.
And that’s just what we can expect to see from Barnes & Noble this week when they announce a new Nook. → Read More
For the longest time Google had denied that its Street View cars had ever captured data—logins, passwords, and the like—from open Wi-Fi access points. Well, it’s now admitted to doing so, saying that such data was “mistakenly collected.” Google says it’s “mortified. → Read More
Smarkets, the London-based social gambling startup, has announced that it’s seen over £1 million traded on its ‘betting exchange’ since it publicly launched in February. The site, which competes with the likes of Betfair and to some degree intrade and betdaq, lets users set their own odds and bet against each other before and during events.
The company has also revealed that it’s finally going to expand into horse racing. Citing the poor user experience of existing offerings, which he doesn’t directly name, CEO and co-founder Jason Trost says that Smarkets made the decision to take their time so that they could get “horse betting right”. That’s likely a coded reference to the challenge the startup faces jockeying for position in light of the much larger Betfair’s pending IPO, which could be valued as high as £1.7 billion. → Read More
When Facebook launched Places in August, it encouraged advertisers to list their businesses in the Places directory. But now an advertiser is taking it one step further and asking passersby to check into a billboard using Facebook Places.
In a new outdoor campaign across the UK for British singer Cheryl Cole, who has a new album coming out and a concert tour, fans who check into the billboard will be taken to her Facebook page and get a chance to win two free tickets (plus travel and hotel) to one of her X Factor shows. The campaign was designed by Mediacom and Polydor Records. → Read More
Google’s recently purchased mobile ad network AdMob is announcing today that it is bringing interactive video ads to Android phones. AdMob already offers the video ad format for iPhones.
Similar to the iPhone formats, the new SDK for Android devices includes interactive video and interactive interstitial ad units. The ad network will dynamically identify screen resolution, size, and network connection speed to serve users the best ad for each device. And Android developers have more interactive options when including ads in their applications. The new ad units themselves can be placed when an app opens or within an app. → Read More
Got a defunct Xbox 360? Who doesn’t, right? Well, why not expend some spare ammo at the lowly gaming system. That’s what these Marines did when one of their systems developed a nasty case of RRoD. [Kotako] → Read More
What you see pictured above is the world’s smallest full HD display. It’s been unveiled today by ORTUS, a joint venture established between Casio and Toppan Printing earlier this year. Sized at just 4.8 inches, the HAST (Hyper Amorphous Silicon TFT) screen features 1,920×1,080 resolution and a pixel density of 458ppi. → Read More
This weekend, Ryan Block put up an interesting post on gdgt entitled: Will the Mac App Store have enough to sell? He raises a number of good points for why Apple may not be able to replicate their current App Store success with this new desktop store. But I’m left wondering if the store won’t lead to a new class of app: a sort of micro-app for the desktop.
Block makes the following points: a) high-end software like Photoshop won’t be placed in this store because Adobe won’t want to give Apple a 30 percent cut of all sales. b) most paid desktop software is dead or dying due to free replacements on the web. c) Apple’s strict rules will prevent developers from using this new store for test or demo software. I agree with all of those points. And that’s why I’m wondering if this store won’t instead lead to this new type of app environment. → Read More
Ray Ozzie, who famously took over the reins as Chief Software Architect at Microsoft when Bill Gates formally retired from the company (his last full-time day being June 27, 2008), stepped down from that position last week and will leave the company behind within months.
Five years ago this week, Ozzie penned a memorable memo, 5,000 words long, entitled “The Internet Services Disruption”, outlining the challenge for Microsoft to catch up to its rivals in the Internet and cloud computing space. He’s celebrating that birthday with a fresh memo: “Dawn of a New Day”. → Read More
Jolicloud, which set out to build a cloud-based operating system for netbooks, appears to be preparing to build and sell its own line of actual netbooks, too.
Tariq Krim, founder and CEO of the French startup, earlier today tweeted links to two interesting pictures.
As others are speculating, these pictures suggest Jolicloud is working on a proper netbook rather than sticking with just building software to run them. → Read More
Presumably this is a viral video for some sort of Jonah Hill-lookalike contest, but these wild and crazy guys blew up an old MacBook Air with a huge M1000 firecracker. The results, while impressive, are marred by the thought that they could have just donated that thing to some orphan children’s fund or whatever. → Read More
Unsurprisingly, the fourth quarter is usually the best sales period for the Kindle (and most retail products), but it looks like this year will be especially strong as more consumers flock to e-books. After announcing a new e-book loan feature last week, Amazon is revealing a number of new Kindle stats today in time for the holiday shopping rush.
According to the company, sales of the new generation Kindle devices have already surpassed total Kindle device sales from the holiday season of last year (October through December 2009). → Read More
Just as Microsoft chief software architect Ray Ozzie is preparing to step down, he’s leaving the software giant with a farewell memo outlining where the “Post-PC” world is headed. Titled “Dawn of a New Day,” it comes across as a dire warning for Microsoft to move faster away from its dependence on the PC towards “continuous services” in the cloud available across a wide array of “connected devices.”
Ozzie has hit upon some of these themes before, starting with a big-think memo five years ago called “The Internet Services Disruption.” Certainly his original concept of Microsoft Mesh was very much in this vein of syncing data across devices and the cloud. But Mesh has been years in the making, and is only now beginning to see the light of day in limited ways. → Read More
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