It is only Monday, but Canadian seed investor and serial entrepreneur Austin Hill is having a pretty good week. Two of his portfolio startups were acquired this week. The biggest exit was BumpTop, which Google snapped up for a rumored $25 million to $35 million. Hill was one of the first seed investors in BumpTop, which raised less than $2 million total. BumpTop’s 3D desktop interface and multitouch gestures may appear in teh future in Android phones, Chrome OS tablets, or maybe even a GPad.
Hill had another exit today with Standout Jobs a company where he was chairman which helps HR departments with social recruiting. The company isn’t saying how much it was acquired for or even who acquired it, but it is most likely a mid-tier jobs site looking to ramp up its social features. Standout raised only about $1.6 million (Canadian), but investors were lucky to get their money back and not much more. So Standout Jobs was more of a sideways deal. But at a time when recruiting sites are hurting all over, that is not the worst outcome. → Read More
With the DEMO 2008 conference kicking off today, a bunch of tech companies are making announcements. Here are some of the highlights: BitGravity Content delivery network BitGravity is launching its streaming video offering, BG LiveBroadcast. The company aims to make streaming video online as instantaneous and high-quality as streaming video on TV, while adding an extra layer of interactivity and customization. BitGravity already provides on-demand (i.e. recorded) video delivery for fifty clients, including Revision3 and Tom Green. Its streaming video service promises to bring the same robust scalability to live events, allowing thousands if not millions of viewers to watch the same shows simultaneously. If you want to stream live events using BitGravity, you can request a machine from them that will come preloaded with all the requisite software. Costs will then accrue depending on how much bandwidth you consume. Blist Blist, a web-based application that promises to make database management as easy as using Excel, is launching in private beta this Tuesday. A number of improvements have been made to the product’s design since we covered it this past November. Of particular note is a new “visual query builder” that makes the construction of complex queries easy with a drag-n-drop interface. Blist’s approach to relational data is also notable; relationships are established primarily in the “design” phase of database construction, obviating the need to explicitly extract relational data during query time. If you become Blist beta tester, head over to InviteShare to share your five invites with others. Eyealike Eyealike is announcing a service called Eyealike Copyright that will hunt down copyrighted material found in videos posted across the web. Eyealike purportedly has a knack for finding copyright material mixed in with user generated content on sites like YouTube. The company claims that its technology can “process hundreds of images and video clips per minute by still objects, object movement, and facial recognition” with 95% accuracy and a “near zero false positive rate.” Its web interface, pictured left, features a prominent “Send Notification” button that will allow companies like Viacom to speed up the process by which they send out take-down requests. GoldMail With GoldMail, you can send slideshows accompanied by audio messages to friends, family, and business contacts. The goal is to enrich communication over the net by providing a way to send not only your voice but visual materials, such as photos and diagrams, that reinforce your → Read More
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