After filing its S-1 for an IPO, the largest independent ad network Millennial Media is releasing a yearly report on on performance of smartphone operating systems on its network in 2011. Continuing its growth as a platform on Millennial’s network, Android impressions grew 504 percent year-over-year.
In 2011, Android had a 47 percent share of device OS impressions, while iOS had a 33 percent share. For basis of comparison, in 2010, iOS had the top spot with a 41 percent share, while Android made up 30 percent. iPhone impression share declined 7% year-over-year but maintained its position as the number one device on the Top 20 Mobile Phones ranking, with 15% of the impression share. Millennial says no other device has been able to achieve the same level of market share of the iPhone.
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Twitter says that 70 percent of its users come from outside the U.S. at the moment, and so it makes sense that this is where it is also investing more to grow the rest of its business. Today the company announced that it has appointed another sales executive to beef up its efforts outside its home market.
Stephen McIntyre, most recently of Google, will be overseeing Twitter’s international self-serve business, based out of Twitter’s European HQ in Dublin, which Twitter opened in September 2011.
McIntyre’s appointment comes about a week after reports emerged that Shailesh Rao, currently based in New Delhi, India, would be leaving Google to join Twitter. Rao is now Twitter’s new VP of international revenue. → Read More
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The most impressive thing about Scan is that it, as a humble QR code app, has raised over $1.7 million in seed funding from, wait for it, Shervin Pishevar via Menlo Ventures, Google Ventures, Charles River Ventures, Yuri Milner’s Start Fund, Social + Capital Partnership, Transmedia Capital, Ludlow Ventures and angels Ariel Poler, Naval Ravikant of AngelPool, Jim Pallotta of Raptor Group and Gaga manager Troy Carter. → Read More
Boku is debuting a brand new mobile payments platform today, that aims to disrupt the current way that consumers pay for goods via their mobile phones or credit cards. As you may remember, Boku offers an online payments platform that allowed users to pay for online goods by charging the transaction to their mobile phone bill. When a user wants to purchase a virtual item, he can enter his cell phone number on a site, the site sends a text message to the phone, the user confirms the transaction with a short reply, and all the charges show up on his phone bill.
With Boku’s new product, called Boku Accounts, the startup is expanding online mobile payments technology to cover e-commerce and retail point-of-sale payments. The payments platform, which will be licensed to carriers, will be embedded on users mobile phones as well as via a pre-paid Mastercard credit-card.
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As Facebook’s imminent IPO became the talk of Silicon Valley and Wall Street, you might have read from the social networking site’s SEC S-1 filing that it pulled in more than $1 billion in profit on revenue of $3.71 billion last year. What Facebook’s prospectus will not tell you, is that the social giant has taken a page from Tencent’s business model, at least according to the Chinese Internet giant’s CTO.
Xiong Minghua, Tencent’s CTO, said in a speech at the ChinaBang Awards ceremony: “I visited Facebook back in 2006 and they cared a lot about Tencent’s business models—especially our micro payment, they studied it thoroughly.” → Read More
We’re all becoming increasingly reliant on consumer cloud services, as cloud storage providers like Dropbox make it easy to share and store files, folders, images, sync between platforms, and more. They make our lives easier, but because they store an enormous amount of potentially sensitive data, there are some inherent risks. While Dropbox is for personal use, it and services like it are increasingly being used by businesses — another example of the ongoing consumerization of enterprise and IT.
That’s why virtualization provider AppSense has created DataLocker, a set of mobile and desktop apps for iOS, Windows and Mac that enable users to encrypt sensitive information in their Dropbox accounts for free — without giving up the convenience of cross-platform syncing. → Read More
Mobile video now accounts for half of all mobile traffic; and on some networks, that number is as high as 69 percent — a testament to the rise of smartphones and tablets as the mobile devices of choice for consumers, and their growing interest in using these devices to do a lot more than just make phone calls.
The data, from a new report on mobile data usage by mobile analytics firm Bytemobile, also found that Android is generating more mobile ad volume than iOS devices, and that Google now accounts for 75 percent of ad-generated data across all platforms.
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Clothes Horse, a fashion technology company based out of New York, is publicly launching its platform today in an attempt to address one of the biggest challenges facing online shoppers: buying clothes that fit. Through the use of a customizable widget that merchants add to their own websites, Clothes Horse can determine within just 30 seconds how the retailers’ items will fit any customer. The goal is not only to decrease shopping cart abandonment, but also the rate of returns due to ill-fitting clothes.
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Tonight, Silicon Valley’s heroes gave competition a rest and joined together to celebrate the spirit of innovation. An all-star committee of tech moguls carefully considered your nominations of visionaries in the fields Engineering Leadership, Product Design and Marketing, General Management, and Disruptive Innovation. They chose 5 leaders per category and awarded them each a $100,000 grant to invest in a startup of their choice.
Here are the winner’s of this year’s TechFellow Awards: → Read More
San Francisco may not have intended to be become the startup mecca that it is today, but now the city government is working hard to make itself as friendly as possible to tech entrepreneurs. Makes sense, considering that there are 1,539 tech companies and 30,000 tech jobs in the city now — a number that’s been growing fast as older industries like high finance continue to suffer through the recession.
What that means is this. Mayor Ed Lee, who came to power last year with heavy support from the local tech scene, is announcing a new initiative today at the TechFellows awards ceremony, that has some intriguing ideas for making the city itself more relevant to the booming industry within it. → Read More
You’re probably familiar with OnLive, the company that made its mark by streaming brand new console and PC games to whatever devices could support a high-bandwidth video stream. Many doubted its technology to begin with (including yours truly – Is OnLive OnCrack?) but they’ve more or less delivered on their promises, and have also been expanding the services they offer. Most recently they introduced OnLive Desktop, which streamed a Windows 7 desktop to your iPad.
That was mainly focused on productivity – Office apps and such. Now they’ve added web browsing to the table. Yes, they will stream live video of a web browser running in a datacenter to your device, which almost certainly already has a web browser. → Read More
The browser wars are in a tense state of suspension right now. The once-obvious advantages of one and disadvantages of another can’t be counted on as much as they could a year ago, and fast-changing standards and interaction methods have produced a sort of uneasy détente while everyone awaits the browser equivalent of the Manhattan Project to catapult them into the atomic age.
Tom’s Hardware just did a nice, thorough examination of the available browsers on Windows 7 and Ubuntu, and the findings are really mixed. It used to be that Firefox always won, and we could all make fun of IE. Then Chrome came and won all the speed benchmarks. And then there was Opera. Now it’s a mess. How do you pick the browser that’s best for you? Easy: you flip a coin. → Read More
It goes without saying that the death of veteran Sunday Times war correspondent Marie Colvin and the French photographer Remi Ochlik – after an artillery shell hit their makeshift press centre in the Syrian city of Homs – is tragic. It’s also testament to the lengths to which journalists often go to get the story. But equally, the use of new technology by ‘citizen journalists’ has been equally significant in documenting the deadly acts of the Syrian government against its own people.
Among those killed in yesterday’s attack on the journalists’ position were three activists. One of those was video blogger Rami Ahmad al-Sayed, who was also known as “Syria Pioneer“. Ahmad al-Sayed had uploaded over 200 videos to various platforms of the killing and destruction in his area. We wrote about him and his video only this week when the Syrian government blocked Bambuser, the live video platform he was using. → Read More
Though Apple, Google, Microsoft, RIM, Amazon, and HP don’t always see eye-to-eye, the six of them have entered into an agreement brokered by California Attorney General Kamala Harris to take a tougher stance on the issue of mobile privacy.
Going forward, the six companies involved must provide users with a privacy policy if the app in question collects personal information. Though the move will affect the app submission and downloading process for users the world over, it was designed to bring those six companies into compliance with California state law.
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Last Friday I visited the Aol* building on Page Mill Road in Palo Alto. But instead of the stench of death and decay you would normally find at a dying company, I found joy and the hustle and bustle of youth. More importantly, I found startups, tens of startups with founders eager to show me around the various VC firms (SoftTech, Morado) and incubators occupying the building’s first floor. → Read More
Every time a dating site succeeds in making a match, it loses two users. To offset churn, Zoosk tells me that tomorrow it’s announcing a new business model that complements subscriptions with date discounts, expert relationship advice, gift ideas, holiday reminders and online scrapbooks.
The products could convince users to pay even after they’ve found their sweethearts. If users fall in love with the new revenue streams, the whole dating industry could start courting happy couples. → Read More
HP just reported mixed first quarter earnings. The company posted non-GAAP diluted earnings per share of $0.92, down 32 percent from the prior-year period (GAAP diluted earnings per share were $0.73, down 38 percent from the prior-year period). First quarter net revenue came in at $30.0 billion, down 7 percent from the previous year. Analysts expected earnings of $0.87 cents a share on revenue of $30.7 billion. GAAP Net Income was down 44 percent to $1.5 billion.
“In the first quarter, we delivered on our Q1 outlook and remained focused on the fundamentals to drive long-term sustainable returns,” Meg Whitman, HP president and chief executive officer, said in a statement. “We are taking the necessary steps to improve execution, increase effectiveness and capitalize on emerging opportunities to reassert HP’s technology leadership.” → Read More
Aiming to become one of the giants of online advertising, ad retargeting startup AdRoll has hired Googler Suresh Khanna as its vice president of sales.
In nearly six years at Google, Khanna held a number of roles. Most recently, he was director of new advertiser sales, where he says he led the North American team for acquiring mid-market and larger advertisers. Until now, Khanna says AdRoll hasn’t had anyone focused on building out the sales team, so one of his big goals is to “attract rock stars.” He also says that he wants to help AdRoll build relationships with larger advertisers and ad agencies. → Read More
Tabber is an upcoming Kickstarter project that essentially adds an LED light show to your guitar and, more importantly, allows you to learn to play chords and solos by following the lights on the fretboard.
The idea is definitely not new. The Fretlight guitar beat these guys to the punch and I wonder what patent issues they will have to deal with. However, as an idea, it’s pretty ingenious. The Tabber is a “sleeve” that fits over the neck of your guitar and it should work, as the folks at Tabber reiterate, on any git-fiddle in your possession.
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Referral traffic is spilling out of both Pinterest and Facebook’s Open Graph frictionless sharing. With Sociable Lab’s licensable EverShare you can snatch their functionality without any serious development work and soak up some page views. EverShare lets you host your own Pinterest-style product or content boards to give your users their social curation fix. It also instantly roots your site into Facebook’s confusing APIs so purchases, comments, reviews, and pins are automatically blasted at friends of your visitors.
Great websites steal, they don’t borrow.
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