Mobile music discovery platform Shazam is reacquiring the intellectual property it sold to music royalty outfit Broadcast Music Inc. (BMI) back in 2005. At the time, the startup had sold the IP, which involves Shazam’s core audio recognition technology, in order to help fund its development. Given Shazam’s recent growth and expansion into other areas beyond music identification, now was the right time for the company to reacquire those rights, says Shazam CEO Andrew Fisher.
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Microsoft might have missed the tablet party bus. At least that’s what a Forrest report published on Tuesday states. Consumers have lost interest in a Windows touch device even though just earlier this year the majority of those polled wanted such a device. But now, likely after the barrage of different tablets released this year, that number has waned as expectations changed. Where a tablet was once thought to replace laptops, now it’s mostly seen as an entertainment device. Recent low-cost tabs such as the Fire and Nook Tablet further define a tablet as a low-cost device.
A Microsoft tablet is on the horizon. That’s a fact. The company demoed a Samsung device at its BUILD conference earlier this year, but the next-gen platform isn’t slated for release until late next year. As Forrester notes, current tablet leaders will already be on their third generation tablets by the time the first Windows 8 slate hits. As time progresses, consumer interest in a Windows tab is rapidly slipping. → Read More
As of yesterday afternoon, Cyber Monday online sales were up 18 percent but apparently a surge of activity yesterday evening helped push the day’s e-commerce sales to record amounts. Cyber Monday online sales, according to IBM’s Coremetrics report, were up 33 percent over 2010, and up 29.3 percent over Black Friday.
comScore is reporting that Cyber Monday sales reached a record $1.25 billion, up over 20 percent from last year, to become the heaviest online spending day in history. According to the Wall Street Journal, this is only the second time a billion dollars in online commerce has occurred in one day. For the holiday season-to-date, $15 billion has been spent online, 15 percent increase versus the same days last year. → Read More
Mobile ad optimization platform Smaato, Inc. released the results of its mobile ad report for Q3 2011 today and found that, for the third consecutive quarter, Windows Phone (156) led the company’s “Smaato Index,” a measure of mobile operating system click-through rates. In second place was RIM (113), which has now overtaken both Apple (89) and Android (84) .
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This is important news for anyone who shops – or sells something – online in Europe. The European Commission this morning put forward a number of legislative proposals to alleviate some of the problems EU consumers encounter when buying goods and services on the Internet (see some examples in Neelie Kroes’ tweet, embedded above).
With the proposed legislation, the Commission basically wants to ensure that all EU consumers can solve such problems without going to court, regardless of the kind of product or service that the contractual dispute is about and regardless of where in Europe it was purchased.
For consumers shopping ‘abroad’ online from another EU country, the Commission wants to create a single, EU-wide platform that will allow people to solve contractual disputes related to cross-border commerce out of court – actually entirely online – within 30 days.
Read the rest of the story on TechCrunch Europe. → Read More
When news breaks on Thanksgiving, you can safely bet that it’s bad news. AT&T’s announcement last week that it had withdrawn its application to acquire T-Mobile (and started preparing for the $4 billion payout it owes should the deal fail) is a great example. As we ate stuffing and turkey and cranberry sauce, AT&T was strategizing (all the football on TV probably helped). The plan, you ask?
Basically, AT&T is in talks with Leap (and presumably T-Mobile) to sell off a big chunk of T-Mobile’s customers and a small portion of its wireless spectrum to regional carrier Leap Wireless, according to the New York Times. → Read More
Fitness fanatics in the U.K. will soon have another gadget to aid them in their quest for physical supremacy: Motorola has just announced that their MOTOACTV fitness tracker will hit stores on December 1.
The MOTOACTV was overshadowed a bit since it first appeared alongside the Droid RAZR, but it’s a fairly nifty device in its own right. If you’re not familiar with the ACTV, think of it as an Android-based amalgamation of an iPod nano and Sony Ericsson’s ill-fated LiveView.
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Lenovo, taking a page out of the Android history books, just announced the LePad S2005 tabletphone for the Chinese market. This Gingerbread device pushes the recent trend of supersize phones into tablet territory. But that’s been done before. The Dell Streak rocked a 5-inch screen with pride way back in 2010. However, way back then, the EVO 4G stole most of the limelight, leaving the Dell Streak in the background. The LePad, or as it will be branded elsewhere, the IdeaTad S2005 actually has a chance to make it big in today’s roaring Android marketplace. → Read More
Automattic has teamed up with Federated Media to – finally – allow WordPress.com bloggers to make money from online advertising. The project is called WordAds and if you’re on WordPress.com you can express your interest for the program here.
From the WordPress.com blog, including a fair bit of snark directed at Google: → Read More
Puppet Labs, a data center automation company, has raised $8.5 million in Series C financing from new investors Cisco, Google Ventures, and VMware. Existing investors Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, True Ventures, and Radar Partners also participated in the round. This brings Puppet Labs’ total funding to $16 million.
Puppet Labs provides systems management and datacenter automation software for the enterprise and the cloud. Puppet Labs’ flagship product, Puppet is an open source data center automation and configuration management framework that provides system administrators with an easy to use platform for transparent and flexible systems management. → Read More
If you’re going to waste your time playing games on Facebook, you might as well do it and help build a better world while you’re at it. That’s the promise, at least, of online entertainment company Sojo Studios, which is today debuting the preview of a Facebook game with a philanthropic twist called ‘WeTOPIA’.
Backed by a former key Facebook employee, Path CEO Dave Morin, and Esther Dyson – both are on the advisory board – Sojo Studios wants to entice online gamers to play WeTopia in order to develop a better world for children, both on Facebook and in the real world. → Read More
Research In Motion this morning introduced a new enterprise mobility solution dubbed BlackBerry Mobile Fusion, aiming to help its business and government clients manage employees’ smartphones and tablets running the BlackBerry operating system, but also Android and iOS devices like the iPhone and the iPad.
Currently in early beta testing with a limited number of enterprise customers, RIM expects to kick off a closed beta program in January 2012, with general availability scheduled for late March 2012 (pricing unknown). → Read More
Here are some of yesterday’s stories on TechCrunch Gadgets: → Read More
Writer marketplace Scripted.com is announcing $700K in seed funding today, from Crosslink Capital, Shopzilla CIO Jody Mulkey and Douglas Feirstein.
Starting out as an offshoot of scriptwriting community Scripped, Scripted pays writers a flat rate to create blog posts, articles, copywriting and tweets for various small business clients. The company, which says it vets writers according to wants and needs of its clients, provides a thousand posts a month for customers like Mailchimp and Levi’s. → Read More
Flavors.me, the dead-simple service for building your own personal profile page, is launching a major redesign on Tuesday, with features that position it to take on the blogging juggernaut that is the Tumblr pageview machine. Among a number of improvements to the service’s tools, user interface and design, the most notable new addition is that of a “follow” button which will now appear on every Flavors.me profile page. This button lets you follow the posts from other Flavors.me users, which includes their aggregated updates from around the social Web, such Twitter posts, Facebook status updates, blog posts, Instagram photos and Foursquare check-ins.
But more importantly, the “follow” button is laying the groundwork for Flavors.me’s next move: support for content creation.
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Yes, really.
General Cannabis Inc. has just announced that it’s acquired Marijuana.com. The company didn’t disclose the details of the deal, but we’ve confirmed that the acquisition price was $4.20 million. Naturally.
The executives involved obviously have a sense of humor, but General Cannabis is a serious business: it’s traded on the OTCQX market, and a year ago it acquired WeedMaps, a popular ‘Yelp for Cannabis Dispensaries‘ site with a large following. WeedMaps was topping $400,000 a month in revenues at the time of the acquisition and it’s growing nicely — the site did over $1 million in gross revenues in July, and now sees 10 million page views a month.
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In my home office sits a 27-inch iMac with a secondary 24-inch LED Cinema Display attached to it. It’s a glorious vision of screen real estate.
And yet, I dread using it.
First world problem? It’s perhaps the definition of the term. But it’s true. I’m sitting here on a couch adjacent to my desk because I’d rather type this post on my MacBook Air. To be completely honest, I’d rather be using my iPad right now. But I must admit, it doesn’t come anywhere close to cutting it when it comes to typing more than a few dozen words. So for now, the MacBook Air exists as the pinnacle of personal computing in my eyes. → Read More
Facebook will IPO in April or June 2012, right on time with our prediction and when it would need to start filing public financial reports, according the the Wall Street Journal. The outlet’s sources say Facebook could raise $10 billion at a $100 billon valuation, and hasn’t chosen which banks to go with yet. But is this the right move? To date, Facebook has been conservative with monetization and progressive with product development. It minimizes ad real-estate in favor of maintaining a healthy user experience for the long term, and pushes products people might not warm up to for years. But outside stockholders could detract from Facebook’s vision and momentum. They could push for faster returns, and pressure the company to display more ads, turn mobile into a direct revenue stream, and play it safe with product. This might produce short-term gains, but could hamper what CEO Mark Zuckerberg has built into a core communications utility for the world. → Read More
Here’s one for all you do-gooder Cyber Monday shoppers out there. “Doing good” and online shopping have traditionally been at odds. You know what your favorite brands are, where to find them online, and maybe you occasionally find yourself wanting to patronize the green, “ethical” equivalent of your favorite brands. Problem is, you have no idea where to find them, and you probably don’t care that much. Plus, search results don’t give you the price points or styles you want.
Well, Fashioning Change is developing a solution to this very problem. The San Diego-based startup is building a recommendation engine that takes information based on the big, well-known brands you love and introduces you to the “do-gooder” or “green” alternative. Today, that recommendation takes the form of a public marketplace (in beta) and a private beta browser add-on, which will be launching in early 2012. (But we have 100 free invites to test the add-on below.) → Read More
The social layer has settled on the web like a dusting of multicolored snowflakes, gracing every story with a little menagerie of sharing counts and buttons. Once basic standards of content publishing were established, basic standards of sharing had to be as well, the internet being as it is a medium of information transmission. First you get the content, then you move it around. We’re still working on the moving around part.
Another layering we’ve seen is the layering of the internet onto the real world. Location-based networking, maps, deals, all that. As soon as we had the ability to tell the world where we were, that information was naturally integrated into our services.
Yet another combination is emerging: the layering of reference and context onto the information you read. What this even comprises is difficult to say exactly, but MIT Media Lab grad student Daniel Schultz (@slifty) has one idea: a browser script that automatically checks what you’re reading against reliable, substantiated facts. It’s a simple idea with innumerable approaches, problems, and implications — which means we’ll probably be dealing with it for a long time. → Read More
