Google Latitude API coming in the next few monthsMonday, March 15, 2010Source: Venture Beat | Category: Technology Steven Lee, a senior product manager for Google who works on the company’s location products, said the search giant will release an application programming interface for Latitude in the next few months. He said the company will have a developer preview soon, while speaking on a panel at the SXSW conference in Austin today. “We hope it will support and foster all sorts of applications,” he said. “Privacy will be very important to this as well. The user will choose for every application, whether they want developers to have access to that data. [...] Read more |
RMG buys Pharmacy TV in deeper move into in-store adsMonday, March 15, 2010Source: Venture Beat | Category: Technology RMG Networks, which is putting ads into displays just about everywhere, announced it has acquired Pharmacy TV for an undisclosed price. Pharmacy TV runs video ads on TVs at pharmacies while customers wait for their turn at the counter. That’s a good match for the main business of San Francisco-based RMG, which puts ads into digital signs at places such as coffee shops, shopping malls, fitness clubs, airlines and gas stations. RMG has been building an “out of home” marketing business to chase down consumers who are increasingly resistant to TV advertising. [...] Read more |
Decision engine Hunch confirms $12M led by KhoslaMonday, March 15, 2010Source: Venture Beat | Category: Technology Hunch, the search engine co-founded by Flickr’s Caterina Fake to help consumers make better decisions, has confirmed that it raised a $12 million second round of funding (via Fake’s blog), led by Khosla Ventures. As we suspected last week, Gideon Yu, formerly the CFO of Facebook now at Khosla, handled the deal and is joining Hunch’s board of directors. The startup’s valuation for this round was $52 million, according to TechCrunch, which also reported that Hunch has handled 50 million queries since its launch in 2007. [...] Read more |
RegaloCard readying its mobile gift card transfer service for US roll outMonday, March 15, 2010Source: Venture Beat | Category: Technology Global mobile payment company RegaloCard has announced that it has completed testing of its gift card transfer service across leading US retailers, and is readying the service for a national roll out. The company claims that it has created a new product category with “micro money transfers”, which allows consumers to send amounts as little as $10 to Latin American countries for free. RegaloCard differs from other mobile money transfer services like M-Via by focusing on moving retail services via gift cards, instead of standalone cash. [...] Read more |
People Power releases SDK for wireless home energy sensorsMonday, March 15, 2010Source: Venture Beat | Category: Technology Serial entrepreneur Gene Wang started People Power, a maker wireless network devices that monitor energy consumption, because he knows how much energy is wasted by the average household. Thermostats are not set properly, TVs draw power even when they’re off and sprinkler systems operate oblivious to weather patterns. “About the dumbest thing you see happening is it’s raining and your lawn sprinklers turn on because they’re just on a timer,” said Wang, founder and CEO of People Power, who said People Power’s sprinkler system device is being developed with a sensor that could tell if your lawn is alredy wet. [...] Read more |
FCC’s Broadband Plan: The Role Of CompetitionMonday, March 15, 2010Source: GigaOM | Category: Media The executive summary of the National Broadband Plan is out today, and we finally know how the FCC plans to treat the issue most responsible for the current state of broadband in the U.S. -- the lack of competition. Read on for the details. Read more |
MOG launches mobile apps with unlimited downloads to your phoneMonday, March 15, 2010Source: Venture Beat | Category: Technology Music streaming service MOG unveiled its mobile strategy today, laying out Android and iPhone apps that will let users get unlimited song downloads to their phones for $10 a month. Subscribers will be able to get on-demand streams, radio and high-quality audio at 320 kbps for $10 per month. In the Android app, you can search for songs or artists either by typing in their names or calling them out with voice search. MOG will launch apps for both platforms in the second quarter of this year. The site, which hosts 7 million songs and pulls in about 7,000 blog posts about music a week, is now attracting 16 million unique visitors a month. [...] Read more |
Happy Anniversary: 25 Years of Dot-comsMonday, March 15, 2010Source: GigaOM | Category: Media The dot-com turns 25. Over the years dot-coms became a symbol of an Internet bubble and a technology bust. Now over 650,000 dot-com domains are registered every month and at present it is estimated that there are over 71 million dot-com domains. Read more |
Ning CEO Bianchini steps down to become EIR at Andreessen HorowitzMonday, March 15, 2010Source: Venture Beat | Category: Technology Ning CEO and co-founder Gina Bianchini is leaving the build-your-own-social-network startup to become an executive-in-residence at Andreessen Horowitz, the new venture firm from her co-founder and Netscape creator Marc Andreessen. Chief operating officer Jason Rosenthal steps up to take her role. Bianchini co-founded the company more than five years ago as a way to let organizations build their own custom social networks and it now hosts about 2.3 million networks. Andreessen announced the move in a blog post today: My fellow co-founder and Ning CEO Gina Bianchini has decided to step down after five and a half years of hard and terrific work. [...] Read more |
iPhone app developers: Where do they come from?Monday, March 15, 2010Source: Venture Beat | Category: Technology Apple’s application platform for the iPhone — and soon, iPad — has proven far more popular than any other, including Facebook. Both in terms of supply and demand, Apple’s app market is far and away the biggest. The latest monthly report from mobile app analytics company Flurry tries to break down Apple app developers into categories. Where did they come from? Flurry sorted them into six categories. From most to least populous: Online: Companies who began on the web including e-Commerce, social networks, online gaming, streaming music, etc. [...] Read more |
Ning’s CEO Shuffle: Gina Bianchini Steps DownMonday, March 15, 2010Source: GigaOM | Category: Media Ning CEO Gina Bianchini is leaving the company and is being replaced by current chief operating officer Jason Rosenthal. Bianchini is becoming an executive in residence (EIR) at venture capital firm of Andreessen Horowitz. Read more |
Google Buzz: Should You Cross the Streams?Monday, March 15, 2010Source: GigaOM | Category: Media As Google continues to try and adapt Buzz to the changing needs of users, debate continues over whether the service should be its own separate publishing platform, like a blog, or whether it should be used to aggregate content from other social networks such as Twitter. Read more |
The Nexus One Needs More HypeMonday, March 15, 2010Source: GigaOM | Category: Media HTC has begun shipping its Android handset to Verizon Wireless in advance of a launch in the next few weeks. If Google is going to move the needle with its flagship phone, though, it has to start backing the phone with a big marketing budget. Read more |
Brian Fargo returns from exile with Hunted: the Demon’s Forge (video)Monday, March 15, 2010Source: Venture Beat | Category: Technology One of video game’s pioneers, Brian Fargo went into exile as the longtime company he created foundered earlier this decade. But he’s back with his own game studio, inXile Entertainment, and is announcing today a major new fantasy role-playing game. Fargo is announcing Hunted: The Demon’s Forge, which he calls the “re-imagining of the classic dungeon crawl.” The game uses high-end graphics and lets players explore a dungeon cooperatively, playing alternatively a big brawling swordsman or an elf-like archer woman. [...] Read more |
Chris Taylor takes a comedy break after launching Supreme Commander 2 (video)Monday, March 15, 2010Source: Venture Beat | Category: Technology Another year has gone by, so that means it’s time for another Chris Taylor game. This year, it’s the furious real-time combat game, Supreme Commander 2. Taylor is the zany founder of Gas Powered Games, the game studio known for its real-time strategy games, where players fight each other simultaneously. Over its 12-year history, Taylor’s studio has cranked out lots of hits. His titles include Total Annihilation, Dungeon Seige, Dungeon Seige 2, Supreme Commander and last year’s Demigod. [...] Read more |
Ask the attorney: The MA risk (Part one)Monday, March 15, 2010Source: Venture Beat | Category: Technology (Editor’s note: “Ask the Attorney” is a weekly VentureBeat feature allowing start-up owners to get answers to their legal questions. Submit yours in the comments below and look for answers in the coming weeks. Author Scott Edward Walker is the founder and CEO of Walker Corporate Law Group, PLLC, a boutique corporate law firm specializing in the representation of entrepreneurs.) Question: My co-founder and I are friggin crushing it. We launched our startup about two years ago, and we now have an opportunity to buy a couple of struggling companies in our space. [...] Read more |
Sentiment search engine RankSpeed puts spotlight on productsMonday, March 15, 2010Source: Venture Beat | Category: Technology RankSpeed, an early player in searching Twitter and blog content for how people feel about subjects, relaunched itself today as a place where you can learn about products based on sentiment. For example, you can search for ‘Facebook apps’ and the word ‘excellent’ and see which products are mentioned the most with that word. RankSpeed will show the percentage of users who have talked about the app and used words like ‘useful’ or ‘terrible’ along with it, in time periods ranging from one month to all time. [...] Read more |
LoKast launches a ‘disposable social network” for sharing media from your iPhoneMonday, March 15, 2010Source: Venture Beat | Category: Technology There are a number of companies at the South by Southwest Interactive conference in Austin offering their own way of sharing your location with friends. LoKast, an app from a company called NearVerse, is launching a mobile app with a compelling spin on that idea — instead of sharing your location with people elsewhere, you share media with people in the same location. In other words, when you open the LoKast app, you get a list of anyone else who also has LoKast open in your proximity (about 300 feet). [...] Read more |
iPhone Platform – Bigger Than Facebook PlatformMonday, March 15, 2010Source: GigaOM | Category: Media When it comes to apps, the iPhone platform is now bigger than the Facebook platform, according to a report by Flurry, a San Francisco-based mobile analytics company. Apple’s iTunes app store has over 140,000 applications in comparison to 60,000 apps available on the Facebook platform. Read more |
For Apps, iPhone Bigger Than Facebook PlatformMonday, March 15, 2010Source: GigaOM | Category: Media When it comes to apps, the iPhone platform is now bigger than the Facebook platform, according to a report by Flurry, a San Francisco-based mobile analytics company. Apple’s iTunes app store has over 140,000 applications in comparison to 60,000 apps available on the Facebook platform. Read more |
