Bubble Motion, which offers a popular a Twitter-like voice blogging service in India, Japan, and Indonesia, has raised $10 million in new funding led by SingTel Innov8 with participation from Singapore’s Infocomm Investments in addition to insiders Sequoia Capital, Palomar Ventures, and NGC. This brings Bubble Motion’s total funding to $45 million.
Bubble Motion’s Bubbly platform is a voice-blogging phone service that allows people to 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. → Read More
Jive CEO Tony Zingale is finally announcing the results of a big project he’s been working on since he took over the company in 2010. It’s not an acquisition or a product release: It’s a massive upgrade to Jive’s board of directors.
Joining the board are McAfee’s outgoing chairman Charles Robel, McAfee CEO (now at Intel) Dave DeWalt, Facebook’s vice president of technical operations Jonathan Heiliger and Google’s vice president of product management Sundar Pichai. → Read More
As we wrote a few months ago, people search site MyLife may have a ton of traffic from searches, but doesn’t really have the social elements that Facebook and LinkedIn offers. Today, the people search site is launching a number of features to help increase engagement on the site.
MyLife is a full-fledged search engine which not only finds people—thanks to aggregated search across social networking sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, and MySpace—but also helps visitors connect with them all on the same site. MyLife pulls information from public records and also allows users to subscribe to the search site to connect with others, track their searches and more. → Read More
According to Russian business newspaper Vedomosti (via Quintura), star investor Digital Sky Technologies has set up a new fund dubbed DST Global – 2. The fund has already made investments in Groupon (January 2011) and is close to investing $50 million in exchange for 5 percent of online music startup Spotify as part of a $100 million round, according to the paper.
You may remember we broke the news that DST was indeed about to lead a huge financing round for Spotify back in February. In other news, DST has also joined a group of investors who’ve put hundreds of millions of dollars into 360buy.com, a Chinese online retailing powerhouse often dubbed China’s Amazon. → Read More
Washington D.C.-based startup EverFi has acquired Outside The Classroom, the provider of the largest online alcohol prevention course AlcoholEdu.
Founded in 2000, Outside The Classroom’s online curriculum focuses on alcohol prevention in America’s youth. Its online products, AlcoholEdu for College and AlcoholEdu for High School, are used in hundreds of high schools and over five-hundred college campuses. More than 3 million students to date have taken AlcoholEdu. → Read More
Cloud computing giant Salesforce.com has acquired social media monitoring company Radian6 for approximately $276 million in cash and $50 million in stock, net of cash. In addition, approximately $10 million in stock and $4 million in cash will be issued to Radian6′s founders (subject to vesting conditions over two years).
Radian6 helps clients like Dell, GE, Kodak and UPS monitor, analyze and engage in ‘hundreds of millions’ of social media conversations. Salesforce argues that the acquisition of the company will enable it to enhance all of its products, including Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Chatter and Force.com. → Read More
Skype realizes full well its software is used by many school teachers and students from around the globe, and today announced that it has built a dedicated social network to help them connect, collaborate and exchange knowledge and teaching resources over the Web.
This morning, the company launched a free international community site dubbed Skype in the Classroom, an online platform designed to help teachers find each other and relevant projects according to search criteria such as the age groups they teach, location and subjects of interest. → Read More
Kickstarter: Coffee Joulies Are Temperature Regulators For Your Java Video: Cute Teddy Bear Charatter Reads Tweets For You LA Noire Will Be A Part Of The Tribeca Film Festival The Klhip: What The World Needs Now Is Another Nail Clipper… Three New 01THEONE Watches Affordably Priced → Read More
Amazon’s move into the cloud music storage and streaming game is nothing if not controversial. I love it. They’ve seemingly looked at what companies like Apple and Google have been dealing with for months, if not years, and just said “screw it, let’s just do it.”
Ballsy. Brilliant. Wonderful.
Of course, the service itself seems kind of “meh”. But I’m more than happy to take “meh” over nothing at all — which is exactly what the other big players have given us. It has been all empty promises (Google) and endless whispers (Apple). Amazon actually did it. And they deserve credit. → Read More
In this week’s episode of Fly or Die, we cover two big launches—Amazon Cloud Drive and Color—and a Quirky DIY pocketKnife called the Switch. Just yesterday, Amazon launched its Cloud Drive, which is a general storage service in the cloud which is being pushed as a media locker, starting with music
Color is the $41 million photo app nobody can figure out. Is it the future or is it a dud on arrival? CEO Bill Nguyen joins us as our special guest and explains how his team is going to “solve the loneliness problem.” (Video after the jump). → Read More
This one’s for you, cricket fans. For those not familiar with “the gentleman’s game”, we are currently in the grips of the ICC World Cup — or The World Cup of Cricket, if you prefer. “Who cares?” or “what’s a cricket?” you may be asking. Well, considering there are only five proclaimed cricket pitches in the U.S., you may have a fair point. But for countries (and cricket powerhouses) like India, Pakistan, Australia, and South Africa (to name a few), cricket is serious business.
In fact, The Economic Times is reporting that the international gambling industry collectively has more than $1.5 billion riding on tonight’s match between India and Pakistan in the World Cup semifinals.
Considering the combustible relationship between the new nations, the rivalry is a fierce one, and the matches tend to take on a significance greater than game itself. This is the first time the two teams have met since the 2008 Mumbai attacks, and Pakistani Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani will be accepting the personal invitation of Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, in a miraculous show of “cricket diplomacy”. → Read More
If James Cameron were to take all the revenues from both Titanic and Avatar, then he may be able to send his own mars rover to space. That’s the closest he’ll ever get to having his 3D tech blasted into orbit now that Nasa pulled the plug on his plans. → Read More
Up here in Seattle there’s a band called A Gun That Shoots Knives. That’s a good idea, but until we get the technology for that ultimate weapon worked out, we’re going to have to use A Crossbow That Shoots Machetes. → Read More
Mobile payments are finally taking off right now. But it is not mobile wallets for consumers with NFC-chipped mobile phones leading the way. It is payment apps for small merchants like those made by Square and Intuit’s GoPayment. Tonight at an Intuit showcase in New York City, I got a sneak peak at several new Intuit products still in development, including an upcoming GoPayment tablet app that aims to replace the cash register for small businesses, Intuit 401k, and an iPad Check-in app for doctor’s offices.
The GoPayment app will work on both the iPad and Android tablets In addition to taking credit card payments with a swiper that plugs into the headphone jack, it also lets merchants set up a cash register with their own products and prices. They can even take pictures of the products with their iPad 2 and the picture is placed on a virtual button to make it easy for any employee to ring up the items. It will also have the ability to take pictures of checks and deposit them from the image. → Read More
I wish every Canon could come in shiny colors like these T3s. But no, they are only limited editions, and tomorrow Canon will release them with matching camouflage straps and protective wraps. The special editions are a part of Fashion Week, where Canon will be hosting some events, during which four of these cameras auctioned off to benefit Japan. → Read More
I love that there are tons of tinkerers out there just putting together robots for no other reason than “hey, this might work.” Home hacker Lars Kristian Roland made this one, a simple rover bot with a gripping claw (it runs on modular hardware and an Arduino, naturally) — but the twist in this case is that it’s controlled by a Chronos watch that has a built-in accelerometer and antenna. → Read More
Whoa! It’s a huge day for the big-name mobile games. Just a little while ago, the universally known Doodle Jump got its long-awaited multiplayer update. Hours later, another massively popular title is gettin’ a big new feature: Tap Tap Revenge, a title so popular that it lead Disney to snatch up the company that built it, is now available on Android. → Read More
I’m in the middle of building a new desktop computer, and for the last couple weeks have been frustrated by the recall of Intel’s new P67 (Sandy Bridge-supporting) motherboards, since those are exactly what value-conscious buyers like myself would be going for. Well, the wait is over — the replacements have arrived. It’s safe to build! → Read More
Doodle Jump. Ever heard of it? If you’re an iPhone owner — or at least, someone who’s ever gone anywhere near the iOS App Store — you probably have. While it’s hovering somewhere around the 10th place slot these days, Doodle Jump’s addictive gameplay and near-constant updates had it locked into the #1 spot for months.
Today, the folks behind Doodle Jump are pushin’ out an update with a feature that might just help it win back the throne: multiplayer. → Read More
