Open source software giant Red Hat has acquired cloud application deployment and management platform Makara.
Makara, which was rumored to be in talks with Red Hat a few months ago, allows organizations to provision, deploy, manage, monitor and scale their Java and PHP applications on both public and private clouds, such as Amazon EC2 and VMWare-based clouds. Makara offers both on-demand and on-premise deployments. → Read More
Sequoia-backed Bubble Motion, which offers a Twitter-like voice blogging service in India and Japan, is bringing its service to Indonesia today via a deal with Indonesian mobile communications company XL Axiata. The service, which has seen considerable traction in India, will be dubbed ‘XL CUAPS.’
Bubble Motion’s BubbleBlog platform delivers a voice-blogging phone service so that people can share status updates in their own voice with fans and followers. It essentially takes Twitter’s model and applies this to voice blogging and mobile phones. These ‘bubblers’ record their voice update into their phone, and their followers everywhere are notified by SMS and prompted to click and listen. BubbleBlog has more than 2 million users in India. → Read More
While News Corp. is now openly admitting that it is exploring options for Myspace (don’t call it MySpace anymore!), the company is still executing, albeit slowly, on its mobile strategy.
This morning, the company announced that it has launched a new mobile website to extend its “social entertainment experience” to mobile devices across the board.
The company will soon release a brand new iPhone app to boot. → Read More
A free iPad, how does that sound to you? You can get one, but you need to live in Japan and sign a two-year contract with SoftBank, the exclusive iPad provider in this country. The telecom behemoth announced a new pricing plan [JP] under which they fully subsidize a 16GB iPad (the Wi-Fi+3G model). → Read More
Payvment, a startup that allows anyone to create and operate a retail storefront on Facebook, has raised $6 million in Series B funding led by Sierra Ventures with a BlueRun Ventures participating in the round. This brings the startup’s total funding to $8 million.
Payvment’s Facebook App lets anyone create a retail store on the social network. The app lets you set up products, categories of products (i.e. shoes, T-shirts, sweaters), import photos, list terms of service and shipping options and more. Once you set up your online shop on Facebook, it will show up in a separate tab on your profile or page under “storefront”. → Read More
RingRevenue, which offers a call performance platform that allows companies to complement their marketing efforts with phone-based campaigns, has raised $4 million more in a round led by led by GRP Partners and Rincon Venture Partners, bringing its total financing to $7.5 million.
Call performance marketing basically extends the tracking, measurement and accountability of online performance marketing to those transactions that occur over the phone. → Read More
The headlines are pretty rough: Comcast hates Netflix! Net neutrality is dying! Communist forces from Russia and Cuba are attack a small town in Colorado and a ragtag band of high school students band together to fight them (although, arguably, this may have nothing to do with Comcast/Level 3)! But what’s really going on here?
First, let’s understand how data gets from the cloud to you. This stuff costs a lot of money and carriers didn’t do it out of the kindness of their hearts. They want to be paid for their data centers. That’s where Level 3 comes in. Level 3 acts as both a backbone – meaning a massive, nationwide carrier of data – and a Content Delivery Network. Back in the old days, the backbone would be the only thing on the net. But once it became clear that hosting all your data on one server was a bad idea, CDNs grew up and allowed content providers to cache their data in different physical locations. You’d hit one CDN in California and I’d hit one in New York. Things worked faster that way. → Read More
It’s no secret that professional social network LinkedIn is actively working on making its platform more socially connected. In the past year, the company has launched a deep integration with Twitter, the ability to follow a contact or company, a better groups functionality and enhanced sharing on the site. And a few months ago, the professional social network launched LinkedIn Signal, which allowed users to apply the professional social network’s filters to Twitter’s firehose. Today, the network once again adding another social feature with the release of a brand new official Share button.
Similar to the Facebook Like button or the Tweet button, publishers can now embed a branded LinkedIn share button with a few lines of code onto their sites. The “Share on LinkedIn” button will allow readers to share content (i.e. news, white papers, presentations) with your professional social network on LinkedIn. → Read More
American Express and Zynga are teaming up to make it easier than ever to turn your money into virtual cows, tractors, and whatever else the folks at the multibillion dollar social gaming company can cook up. And this time, it doesn’t involve actually forking over cash — at least, not directly.
You see, American Express is now allowing its customers to exchange their ‘membership rewards’ points for virtual goods and/or ‘game cards’ that can be redeemed for Zynga’s in-game currency. These points are earned as American Express customers use their cards — the AmEx site says that you get one point for “virtually every dollar you spend on your Card.”
Some of the rewards come fairly easy, with prices beginning at 200 points; others run into the thousands. To help make these rewards more appealing, Zynga is offering exclusive virtual items like a Purple Cow in FarmVille (540 AmEx member reward points), a Café World Amex Lightning Stove (1945 points), and other goods that can’t be acquired any other way in the games. → Read More
Startup incubator Y Combinator has announced this morning that it is partnering with Yodlee, the provider of personal financial management an payments data to give the incubator’s startups access to Yodlee’s technology.
While Yodlee’s technology is used in a vast number of financial-focused startups, it is probably most well known for powering Mint.com’s core technology of aggregating account information from banks and credit card companies. For example, if you log into your bank’s website and they offer you the ability to aggregate accounts from other banks and financial institutions, Yodlee powers this technology. → Read More
Enterprise cloud management software provider Abiquo has raised roughly $10 million in Series B funding led by Balderton Capital, with existing investors Nauta Capital and Eurecan participating. Bernard Liautaud, a Partner at Balderton Capital and well known for being the founder and former CEO of Business Objects, will join the Abiquo Board of Directors.
Abiquo offers cloud management software that enables companies to create and manage private, public and hybrid clouds. → Read More
The European Commission has launched an investigation into Google after some vertical search engines submitted formal complaints that the firm had used its dominant position to crowd out and ‘disappear’ their results in its index – as reports various outlets including Bloomberg and the BBC.
The EU is obliged to look into whether Google as purposely lowered the search rankings of price comparison sites Foundem (UK) and Microsoft-owned Ciao, and French legal search engine ejustice.fr in its results.
The EU investigatation will also take in Google’s ad platform, which covers Google’s unpaid and sponsored search results and “an alleged preferential placement of Google’s own services.”
We’re going to take a look at what all this means. → Read More
Xerox’ Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) is spinning out PowerCloud Systems, the cloud-managed networking solutions provider that it has incubated through the Startup@PARC program since early 2008. PowerCloud has also gained more backing, with Walden Venture Capital and Javelin Venture Partners joining the line-up.
PowerCloud offers cloud-based technology for OEM vendors that is designed to make business networking devices easier to deploy, secure, and manage. The company builds on intellectual property developed at PARC, including two exclusive and eight shared patents in areas ranging from cloud-virtualized network controllers to “usable security.” → Read More
Exclusive - Totsy, a private sale site targeting moms of kids aged 0-7 (and moms-to-be), has raised $5 million in Series A funding from DFJ Gotham and Rho Ventures. The financing round follows the startup’s recent “acquisition” of competitor bTrendie’s member base.
Totsy is the umpteenth niche-specific (in this case, for everything from prenatal care products, baby gear, travel accessories to children’s clothing and toys) to emerge, following in the footsteps of flash sales sites like pioneer Vente-Privée.com, Gilt Groupe and Rue La La. → Read More
So… Any Good Black Friday Stories To Share? Nooka’s Zub Zayu, Another Tasteful Abstact Wristwatch Whoa: Nintendo Sells 1.5 Million Consoles During Black Friday Week Seven Gifts For The Blue Collar, Outdoorsy Dad Or Husband Gresso Luxor: The Phone You Bury Alongside Your Still-Living Servants In Your Stone Tomb → Read More
A new report from Juniper Research forecasts global mobile games revenues to surpass $11 billion by 2015, nearly double what they were in 2009.
All in all, it’s a fairly conservative prediction in my opinion, but what’s interesting is that the research firm also says in-game purchases will overtake the traditional pay-per-download model, with Apple’s in-app billing mechanism leading the way, as the primary source of monetizing mobile games in about two years (by 2013). → Read More
As expected, Virgin’s new iPad-only magazine Project has hit the App Store. Most had been anticipating it at some point later today, but it actually went live in the U.S. store right around midnight PT. We’ve just managed to snag a copy after a pretty lengthy download (these magazine makers really need to get these file sizes under control).
We’ll do a more thorough walk-through once we’ve actually sat down and read the thing. But at first glance, Project looks nice. The interactive movie cover reminds me a bit of the newspapers in the Harry Potter films. Of course, once I got past the cover, it took me a bit of time to figure out how to navigate through the damn thing. But I eventually got the hang of it. → Read More
Facebook co-founder and former Obama social media guru Chris Hughes has just launched Jumo, a social network for charities, in beta today. Jumo aims to help you discover what causes matter to you by allowing you to follow specific charities as well as keep tabs on what your friends are following. Seems simple enough.
On Jumo each cause/charity has its own relevant news stream, sort of like what would happen if the Facebook app, “Causes,” coincidentally started by Sean Parker and former Zuckerberg roommate Joe Green, had its own social network that allowed you to actually “friend” charities. → Read More
There seems to be a common cycle for many startups. First, you capture users. Then, you capture brands/celebrities. Then you capture revenues. Most startups never make it past step one, let alone steps two and three. The mobile photo sharing service Instagram rocketed past step one in about a week. And then kept going. Now it’s time to explore step two. Which is exactly what they’re doing with their first major brand partnership: National Geographic.
The partnership seems like an obvious one since Instagram is all about great-looking pictures, and National Geographic is known for great-looking pictures. “National Geographic makes a ton of sense as an initial partner – they’re a fantastic company with such a rich visual history. Given that they’re so visually oriented, it’s a no-brainer that we’re going to be trying some interesting stuff out with them over the next few months,” Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom tells us. → Read More
The Google-Groupon acquisition rumors are coming in hot and heavy now. The day began with a rumored price of $2.5 billion, which was way too low. Now it ends with a more likely price somewhere between $5 billion or $6 billion. Whatever the price, it will likely be Google’s largest acquisition ever if it goes through (beating out DoubleClick’s $3.1 billion, and certainly YouTube’s $1.65 billion price tags).
But why is Google even interested in Groupon? It is essentially an e-commerce site, bringing consumers daily deals from local and national merchants. Google doesn’t do e-commerce very well (although it is trying through sexier product search). Buying Groupon would be a very risky $5 billion bet for Google in an unproven area outside its sweet spot of search I won’t even get into valuation, which at $5 billion would be somewhere in the neighborhood of ten times whispered revenue run-rate of $500 million. But Groupon is the clear market leader in the fastest growing new category on the Internet, and Google seems willing to pay whatever it takes to buy market leadership. As one CEO in the local commerce industry put it to me on Monday, “I think the way Google will evolve is they will want to control everything significant on the Internet.” → Read More
