Sprint, newly acquired by Japanese SoftBank for $20.1 billion earlier this month, has just announced earnings results for the third quarter, perhaps showing just how fortunate this acquisition will be for the company. For the period ending September 30, the company reported negative EPS of $.26 on revenues of $7.3 billion, an increase of nearly 6 percent year-over-year. That’s down from… → Read More
Telefonica Digital, the new media arm of the giant Spanish carrier Telefonica, has made another big investment in its bid to become an international communications platform extending beyond basic voice and data services. Today, it announced that it would buy TokBox, a video calling platform that works across websites and mobile apps through a series of APIs that is currently used by 50,000… → Read More
Today, the popular image-sharing platform Imgur is announcing a significant change to its user experience in hopes of increasing the viral potential of its images. In what founder and CEO Alan Schaaf calls “the biggest update” made since launching the site in February 2009, Imgur’s users can now upload their photos directly to the community on Imgur.com via a new icon which will appear in the… → Read More
Datahug, a ‘business networking automation’ startup, which we covered in depth here has secured a €2.5 million Series A financing from European VC, DFJ Esprit.
The investment means Datahug wil now expand in the US and internationally. Current customers include Grant Thornton, Plantronics, BDO and CPL. DFJ Esprit is also a user of the software, as is Balderton Capital. → Read More
Persuading publishers to make their eBooks available to read over the Web is probably quite a big ask. Persuading them to sell those eBooks on a ‘pay-as-you-go’ basis, enabling readers to purchase specific pages or chapters of a book only — well, that’s just crazy talk. Not so crazy, it seems, that one UK startup is taking a stab: ValoBox launches its on-demand browser-based eBook service… → Read More
Amazon has confirmed it’s using LOVEFiLM, the movie rental company it acquired at the start of 2011, to power the video service in Kindle Fire and Kindle Fire HD tablets sold in the U.K.. The slates go on sale in the U.K. today and Amazon is offering Fire buyers a one month free trial of LOVEFiLM. → Read More
Hot on the heels of funding wins for Handybook and PeoplePerHour, another investment in an online labour booking company this month: Intel Capital is leading a $4 million Series A funding round into Russia’s Eruditor Group, an online marketplaces provider for freelancers and businesses in sectors including healthcare, beauty, sports and tutoring. Runa Capital is also investing in the round. → Read More
We are still waiting for official word on when Spotify will make the move to a browser-based version, or port its App Center to its mobile app. But in the meantime, third parties continue to build out their presence on Spotify’s platform — perhaps a sign of more activity coming soon. The latest of these is Soundrop, a creator of listening rooms and social-jukebox-style services (a la… → Read More
Rock Health, the seed accelerator for startups focused on the health space, landed a big, new partner back in August: The well-known Silicon Valley venture firm, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. The result of the new partnership? The promise of a considerably larger seed investment for its next batch of startups, as Kleiner joined Rock Health’s existing partners in offering $100K in seed… → Read More
Dhingana, a startup with a free service for streaming Indian and Bollywood music, has raised $7 million in Series B funding.
The company’s catalog includes 500,000 songs in 35 languages, which it makes available on its website and through smartphone apps. Dhingana says it has built an audience of 15 million monthly active visitors, making it the most popular service of its kind. And 40 percent… → Read More
Online real estate service Zillow is expanding its real estate listings today by adding “pre-market inventory” — specifically, homes that have either been foreclosed or are in the foreclosure process.
Increasing the selection of available homes is particularly important now, Zillow says, because the inventory of for-sale homes listed on the site has fallen by 20 percent over the past year. → Read More
There’s been a lot of chatter about the amount of apps in the Windows Store ahead of this week’s Windows 8 launch. Earlier today, I had a chance to sit down with Microsoft’s corporate vice president for Windows Web Services Antoine Leblond to discuss the current state of the Windows Store and the new developer ecosystem → Read More
I use Google products for pretty much everything, including documents, spreadsheets (ew) and slide presentations (double ew). Now that these products are safely nestled under “Google Drive”, they’ve been renamed to Docs, Sheets and Slides. Yay for that. But what’s really interesting, and something that I missed during the Apple and Facebook frenzies yesterday, is that Google has submitted these… → Read More
PageWoo seeks to solve a number of problems for mobile marketers: It is at once a content-generation engine, as well as a multi-image testing platform. It can target ads based on location and even on the weather. Oh, and did I mention that it provides detailed analytics that can be used to better target those ads. → Read More
I’ve been using Twitter for just about six years now, someone on Twitter informed me. Naturally. There are quite a few things that I’ve enjoyed about the service over the years, including the ability to connect with people all over the world in real-time.
But do you know what I appreciate about Twitter the most? Ushering in the notion of “brevity” for the entire Internets. Not sure what it… → Read More
Ever since we heard the first rumors about Microsoft dropping the “Metro” moniker for its new touch interface and its app, there has been a lot of confusion about what the new interface should be called. Is it the new Windows UI? Windows 8-style UI? Are they Windows 8 apps or Windows Store app? Is it still Metro and all the rumors were false? Even just a day before the launch of Windows 8, most… → Read More
In the conference call discussing Zynga’s latest earnings report, CEO Mark Pincus acknowledged that the company has not met its own goals for growth, something he blamed on two things — “game execution” and the growth of mobile.
On execution, Pincus said Zynga had struggled to “maintain the historical level of engagement” in its Ville franchise of games: “We didn’t create enough new heat for… → Read More
It’s not much, but it’s a start: Notify Me Not is a small, compact site dedicated to helping you and yours stop annoying emails from reaching your inbox. By focusing on the hows and whys of notification emails, the site aims to make your inbox a cleaner place and to calm your monkey mind. → Read More
Facebook’s 10-Q reveals some juicy tidbits left out of its earnings call yesterday. The final price it paid for Instagram was $715 million in stock and cash. Despite rumors that it has stopped growing in mature markets, Facebook’s US user count did increase slightly from 168 million to 171 million monthly users during Q3. And the amount of people who accessed Facebook solely from mobile each month… → Read More
Intimidating voters at the polls is so 19th century. And, now that courts continue to overturn Republican voter ID laws, based on the fact that just 10 incidences of voter fraud in the last decade doesn’t justify disenfranchising thousands of minority voters without a driver’s license, what is the GOP to do? Thankfully, America’s #1 fake news site has reimagined voter suppression for the 21st… → Read More
Nithin Mathews, Anders Lyhne Christensen, Rehan O’Grady, and Marco Dorigo are researchers from Universite Libre de Bruxelles and Instituto Universitario de Lisboa and they are leading us down the primrose path towards human extinction. More precisely, they’re using a method called specially-targetted communication. The flying robot “selects” ground robots and communicates with them by changing LED… → Read More
Zynga is giving another carrot to investors. The company is kicking off a $200 million share repurchasing program. It’s the first time Zynga has ever done this.
The news comes on the heels of fresh cost-cutting with layoffs for 5 percent of the company’s workforce and potential closures for international offices in the U.K. and Japan. At the same time, the company just unveiled what could be a… → Read More
According to Reuters, Yahoo! is actively closing down its Korean business and cutting around 200 jobs. We’ve reached out to Yahoo! for comment and confirmation and will update you as soon as we hear back.
This shutdown was already reported, and it was supposed to happen by “the end of the year.” The end of the year has apparently happened. → Read More
Zynga announced today its first move into online casino gaming, in other words, gambling-oriented games that deal with real money.
Zynga announced this afternoon it has inked an exclusive partnership with bwin.party, the Gibraltar-based online gambling company, to offer real money online poker and casino games in the United Kingdom, where such things are currently legal (they are not permitted… → Read More
Zynga said it saw third quarter revenue of $317 million, which was slightly above the lower range of $300 million to $305 million the company said it would see earlier this month. Bookings came in at $256 million, up 11 percent year-over-year. The company saw a loss of 7 cents per share, and its non-GAAP earnings, which exclude one-off share based compensation costs, were 0 cents per… → Read More
Condition One enables video producers to capture and share what typical video products miss, with a 180-degree field of vision. It’s recently expanded its seed round to $2.35 million, coming from Mark Cuban, who invested prior to Demo Day, as well as Manilla CEO George Kliavkoff and other angels. → Read More
Two of Salesforce.com’s most high profile “social media” acquisitions are showing signs of trouble. At Radian6, Salesforce.com is reported to be laying off “less than 100 people.” And at Buddy Media, the company amended its 8-K, which shows $20 million in net losses for the first six months of the year. → Read More
News.me, the social news service incubated at betaworks, announced today that it’s officially pulling its iOS apps out of the App Store. The company is also claiming that it’s yet another victim of Twitter’s latest API guidelines, and states that Twitter may have even viewed its service as a competitor. We might not go that far, but it makes for a good story. → Read More
Bolstering its arsenal of first-party games for the Japanese market, GREE acquired developer Pokelabo for $173 million in an all-cash deal. Asia-focused venture capital firm DCM gets a win with this acquisition as it had a little over 20 percent of the company. Sega also had a strategic investment in the company, after it was founded five years ago. → Read More
The Internet of Things. It’s a phrase that holds so much promise but to date has not yet turned our world into one filled with tiny connected sensors feeding a vast matrix of data – just yet. Data surrounding us from every animate and inanimate object in the world. That at least has been the vision, if a tough one to achieve.
However, UK and Switzerland-based startup called Evrythng thinks it… → Read More
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