AOL Europe has lead an acquision of video distribution network Goviral today, to the tune of $96.7 million. Goviral distributes branded video content for mainstream brands, as well as content producers and advertising agencies. Originally out of Copenhagen, the company now has offices across Europe. The initial purchase is for $74.1 million and $22.6 million in a two year earn out. It joins others AOL acquisitions in the last year including, StudioNow, 5min Media, Thing Labs, Pictela, about.me and, er, TechCrunch.
We’re hearing this deal was lead directly by Kate Burns, head of Europe for AOL. → Read More
Here’s a selection of stories from the past week on CrunchGear: Cloud-Based Storage Coming To PS3 (But For A Premium)? Audi-Designed Carbon Skis: Want So Bad Just In Time For Trenta: Send Your Facebook Friends Starbucks Card eGifts So Why Should You Care About NFC? How The Glif Got Made: From Design To Sales In Five Months → Read More
The title of strangest WTF story of my morning is Plentyoffish CEO Markus Frind recounting how his online dating site got hacked, he and his wife were harassed and someone clumsily attempted to extort his company in the aftermath of the events. If that is in fact what happened …
First up, Frind points out that the site has indeed been hacked last week in a “well planned and sophisticated attack”.
Apparently, email addresses, usernames and passwords were downloaded, although Frind does not say how many. Plentyoffish has already reset the passwords for all users and claims to have plugged the security hole that allowed the hackers to enter. → Read More
Back in November, Reuters published an article titled “Twitter co-founder hopes to create news network” where Biz Stone mulled over the idea that Twitter could create a social news firehose based on verticals. While the erroneous headline ended up being debunked by Twitter, some hypothesized that this could work if news organizations were given access to all tweets on a given topic as well as the power to curate the stream.
Back then my colleague MG Siegler said there was clearly something to this idea. MG is right (sigh) namely because it is already happening. Humans are functioning as defacto news aggregators using the publication tools already available. This, while not a novel idea, really hit home in the past two weeks with the two subsequent revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt. → Read More
Facebook is today launching ‘Places Deals’ in the UK and Europe. Facebook users will be able to get discounts and special deals in shops, cafes and restaurants by checking in on Facebook Places on their smartphone.
We’re live broadcasting the press conference above.
The Telegraph broke an early story on this this morning.
‘Places Deals’ launched in the US last November with Macys, Gap and Starbucks.
European partners will be: Starbucks, Yo Sushi, Mazda (Mazda 20% off an MX5), O2, Argos, Debenhams, Alton Towers and Benetton.
Live now in Germany, France, Italy, Spain. → Read More
Japanese telecommunications company Nakayo is preparing an IP home phone [JP, PDF] that features an integrated 7-inch Android tablet. When receiving a call, users can pick up the handset to speak, push a button on the display (the tablet) to make a hands-free call or take the tablet out, walk around and speak into its mic. → Read More
Guy Grimland of Israeli business newspaper TheMarker published two articles (both are in Hebrew) this morning about a rumored relationship between Facebook and Face.com.
The first article claims that Face.com rebuffed an acquisition offer worth ‘tens of millions of dollars’. The second article claims that Face.com is powering Facebook Photos’ facial recognition functionality, which was clearly upgraded in the past few months, albeit, with no indication there was a third party involved. → Read More
You know how I know Quora is going to be big? No one can shut up about it.
That includes both people who love it and people who hate it. And that dichotomy is important, because it will keep people talking about it. And that will keep people signing up. And it will keep those that already signed up going back. And that’s important because Quora is a service that takes a bit longer than others to get into.
Anyway, the past couple of weekends have brought some truly great bitchmemes about Quora. Last weekend, it was Vivek Wadhwa who kicked things off on this very blog with his post, Why I Don’t Buy The Quora Hype. That post led to a firestorm of reactions (both positive and negative) in both the comments section and on Twitter. In fact, at one point after the post went up last weekend, I swear my entire tweet feed was devoted to it. → Read More
What you’re looking at above is a screenshot from a Best Buy inventory. Pretty amazing, eh? But why am I showing it to you? There seems to be nothing juicy about it. Y’see, it’s not all that it appears to be, my friend…
Pulling off some serous sleuthing, Android Central forum member, paulmike3, noticed that the number seen up the top left of the image (highlighted as number 3) is actually the very same barcode number that appeared on a (since pulled) YouTube video showing an HTC Thunderbolt unboxing.
So, like a double rainbow, I hear you asking “What does this mean!?” → Read More
Robert Scobleized Quora today.
It was only a couple of weeks ago that I mentioned super-blogger Robert Scoble’s penchant for taking very strong positions on technology and startups and then reversing those decisions completely on a whim.
I love him for his quick retreats.
And I certainly admire a man who’s willing to rethink his opinion after weighing new evidence. → Read More
I’m loathe to write again about Wikileaks, or about its pig-to-man founder, Julian Assange. Not because I’ve run out of things to say, but because the response is so predictable when I do.
Within minutes, the Assange fanboys – the Wikiliebers, if you like – will swarm into the comments, accusing me of unfairly slandering their hero. “He’s sticking it to The Man!” they’ll cry, “he’s disrupting the mainstream media!” they’ll holler, “it was a honeytrap!” they’ll protest, until inevitably someone will accuse me of being in the pay of the US government and the whole thing will descend into farce.
No forest of Vanity Fair and New Yorker profiles or unrelated criminal allegations or hubristic statements about having “two wars I have to end” will convince the Wikiliebers of the truth: that Assange is an arrogant computer genius who began Wikileaks with the best of intentions but has since lost sight of his principles in the relentless pursuit of personal celebrity. (I say that like it’s a bad thing)
But if I take some flak for my relatively inconsequential badgering of Assange, I can only imagine how much Bill Keller must be getting right now. After all, Bill Keller is the man who is about to put Wikileaks out of business once and for all. → Read More
In an interview with 60 Minutes, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange compares his values to those of the Founding Fathers of the United States and argues that he is actually playing “inside the rules.” He defends his actions by leaning heavily on the First Amendment, stating that “our founding values are those of the U.S. revolution.”
On the possibility of facing prosecution in the U.S. for leaking sensitive diplomatic cables and military documents, he argues: “there’s been no precedent that I’m aware of in the past 50 years of prosecuting a publisher for espionage. It is just not done. Those are the rules. You do not do it.”
Both the U.S. Justice Department and the Pentagon are conducting a criminal investigation against Assange and WikiLeaks, but if WikiLEaks is charged with a crime for publishing classified documents, it begs the question of whether other publishers such as the New York Times (which also published part of the documents) could also be prosecuted. Of course, the U.S. government is not currently going after the New York Times. It is going after WikiLeaks. But Assange makes the case that should not be tolerated. (Video after the break). → Read More
Netflix is interesting because it is the first service to follow the disruptive arc of the iPad. Every time the iPad is analyzed, the projections are anywhere from just plain wrong to what amounts to a niche. Doesn’t run applications… now there’s an AppStore. Doesn’t run Flash… now there’s a Flash converter app. Apps don’t support a magazine subscription model… Tuesday they will. Won’t be accepted by IT… 80% penetration. Will be overwhelmed by Android tablets… Apple will Verizon them with iPad 2.
What is reminiscent of iPadnomics is the speed with which the disruption is underestimated, the naiveté with which the backlash is orchestrated, and the resultant vaulting of the service into a near-incumbent position before the deposed incumbents can retrench from the initial mistaken counterattack. Netflix is already at the stage where iTunes was when the music cartel tried to cap it. While Amazon may be a cheaper service without so-called DRM, there’s no device comparable to Apple TV at the end of the value chain. → Read More
Word on the street is that cloud-based game save management will be coming to the PS3 beginning with firmware 3.60. Hate the idea of the cloud managing your saves? Don’t worry, for it looks like the feature will only be available to PlayStation Plus subscribers. Outrage! → Read More
‘The Social Network’ star Jesse Eisenberg hosted “Saturday Night Live” tonight and opened the show talking about the movie’s impressive eight Oscar nominations. The monologue then switched to video of actual Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg watching his two “Berg” doppelgangers backstage, ”Why can’t I go in there, I’m the real Mark Zuckerberg? → Read More
Ever since the iPad came out, print media companies have been feeling their way in this new medium, but so far they’ve just been stumbling over themselves.
They are latching onto the iPad as a new walled garden where people will somehow magically pay for articles they can get for free in their browsers. But if they want people to pay, the experience has to be better than on the Web, and usually it’s not.
This sorry state of affairs is true for both magazines and newspapers. The New York Times iPad app, for instance, is gorgeous but crippled. All the links are stripped out of the articles, even from the blogs. Meanwhile, most iPad magazines are little more than PDFs of the print issues with some photo slideshows and videos thrown in. They end up being huge files—I recently downloaded a single issue that was 350 MB, some issues of Wired are 500 MB—with the same stale articles as in the print version. Replicating a dead-tree publishing model on a touchscreen is a recipe for obsolescence. → Read More
‘The Social Network’ star Jesse Eisenberg hosted “Saturday Night Live” tonight and opened the show talking about the movie’s impressive eight Oscar nominations. The monologue then switched to video of actual Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg watching his two “Berg” doppelgangers backstage, ”Why can’t I go in there, I’m the real Mark Zuckerberg? → Read More
This week’s episode of OMG/JK, the show I do on TechCrunch TV alongside Jason Kincaid, is all Google all the time. So just to even things out a bit, we kick things off by showing off my awesome new TikTok iPod nano wristwatch. For those who don’t remember, this is the result of the most successful Kickstarter project ever.
We then dive into the Google stuff including Eric Schmidt being replaced by Larry Page as CEO, Google’s index changes, Google Voice number porting, and the upcoming Android Honeycomb event. Watch it above. → Read More
Late last night the 43 startups in the most recent Y Combinator class got quite a surprise. Start Fund, a new fund created by DST’s Yuri Milner as an individual and SV Angel, offered each of the companies a $150,000 investment in the form of a convertible note with no cap and no discount.
Most of these companies are still in stealth mode, and Start Fund hasn’t seen them. They made the offer based on the Y Combinator stamp of approval.
The startups are jumping on board. 36 of the 43 startups in the class had signed the paperwork to take the loan before the event was even over last night, says David Lee, a managing partner at SV Angel who’s also managing the Start Fund. “As of 3 pm today we’ve received 39 confirmed signature pages, and we believe the rest are awaiting approval from their attorneys.” → Read More
