The latest from TechCrunch
- Friendster Gets A Major Makeover, Calls Other Social Networks Plain And Boring
- Sonoa's Mobile App Accelerator Looks To Cut Load Times By 90%
- Done Deal: Comcast Takes Over NBC Universal
- MOG Launches All Access, Sets New Standard For Online Music
| Friendster Gets A Major Makeover, Calls Other Social Networks Plain And Boring | Top |
| Log on to Friendster today and you’ll see a background image that says ‘Watch this face! … on December 4′. Turns out the pioneering social network is in for a major revamp tomorrow, including a new logo , tagline (”Connecting Smiles”) and an entirely fresh look. Friendster outlines some of the changes in a video (embedded below), in which it calls out other social networks (*cough* Facebook and *cough* MySpace) for being plain and boring. My absolute favorite part of the video: “I mean, if everyone’s there , woop de doo”. Friendster in the clip says the redesign aims to place more emphasis on 3 pillars: Simple, Fun and Personal. The company also features glimpses of the new website lay-out, which looks a whole lot like Facebook in my opinion, but seemingly mixed with the customization capabilities of MySpace (e.g. it looks like you can change the background color of pages with a single click). Apologies for the blurry screenshot, but watch the video to see it in action. Friendster, founded in 2001, has raised over $45 million in venture capital to date, and is sitting on some potentially lucrative IP . It’s no longer hot in the U.S. any way you look at it, but it’s most definitely still a big deal in the Asia/Pacific region . So much so that last year the company appointed Richard Kimber as its new CEO (he used to head Sales and Operations in South East Asia for Google) and has openly started shopping itself to potential buyers in the region over the Summer. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 | |
| Sonoa's Mobile App Accelerator Looks To Cut Load Times By 90% | Top |
| The day you got your brand new iPhone 3GS, Palm Pre, or Motorola Droid, there’s a fair chance you thought your days of endless loading screens was behind you. After all, each of these comes equipped with a high-powered processor capable of running 3D games and multitasking. Yet the loading screens persist. Operating system shortcomings aside, one of the biggest culprits is actually out of your phone’s hands entirely: the fault lies with backend server calls, as the apps you’re using request data from online servers. Sonoa Systems , the company behind Apigee , thinks it has the answer. It has built a cloud based service designed to helps companies optimize the data being sent to their mobile apps. And it says it can make these load times up to ten times faster. Sonoa’s Mobile App Accelerator is based off of Amazon’s EC2. Developers send data through Sonoa as a proxy, which is in turn routed to mobile apps requesting the data. The proxy service optomizes using advanced caching and by automatically paginating data. In other words the company says it can send data to phones “drip by drip”, rather than as a large download that can be time consuming to fetch. The service can also translate data sent from the API from XML to formats that are more friendly to the mobile device downlading the data. The service will work for applications on mobile platforms including the iPhone, Android, and Blackberry. Sonoa says that it can decrease load times from 20 seconds to 1-2 seconds. And because it’s based on EC2, it can help your service scale if one of your mobile apps suddenly goes viral (or gets featured on the App Store). Obviously speeding up transfers has some secondary benefits, too — because users are downlading data for less time, this could help a bit with battery life. Sonoa has actually offered services for managing web-based APIs for some time, allowing developers to manage access rules to their APIs. In August it launched Apigee , which the company likens to a Google Analytics for APIs. And, as it turns out, Apigee has become especially popular with mobile developers using it for analytics. Apigee is free to most users, but compared to Sonoa’s core offerings its features are rather limited. The Sonoa Mobile App Accelerator is the company’s answer for developers looking for a more robust, premium package. Sonoa costs $3,000 monthly to start with, and will ramp up as customers choose to add more advanced features. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 | |
| Done Deal: Comcast Takes Over NBC Universal | Top |
| Comcast and General Electric announced early this morning that they agreed to form a joint venture that will be 51 percent owned by Comcast and 49 percent by GE. The joint venture, which will consist of the NBC Universal businesses and Comcast's cable networks, regional sports networks and more, will be managed by the newly formed Comcast Entertainment Group (CEG). GE will contribute to the joint venture NBCU's businesses valued at $30 billion, including its cable networks, filmed entertainment, televised entertainment, theme parks, and unconsolidated investments, subject to $9.1 billion in debt. Comcast will put in its cable networks (including E!, Versus and the Golf Channel), its ten regional sports networks, and certain digital media properties, collectively valued at $7.25 billion. Comcast has also agreed to pay GE approximately $6.5 billion in cash. Former E! Networks President and CEO Ted Harbert will be heading the new entity, as he was recently promoted to President and CEO of Comcast Entertainment Group. GE expects to realize $9.8 billion pre-tax in cash before debt reduction and transaction fees and after buyout of the Vivendi stake . GE expects to realize approximately $8 billion in cash after paying down the existing NBCU debt and transaction fees. Headquarters for the business will remain in New York. The joint venture board will have three directors nominated by Comcast and two nominated by GE. The transaction is subject to receipt of various regulatory approvals and other customary closing conditions, which is expected to be a very rocky road . ( Image source ) Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. | |
| MOG Launches All Access, Sets New Standard For Online Music | Top |
| MOG’s much anticipated All Access music service launches today for anyone to come and give it a try. I’ve been using the service for the last few weeks and, despite my initial skepticism over the fact that users must pay for the service, I’ve been impressed. MOG makes millions of songs available users on demand over the Internet. The user experience and social aspects of the service put it far ahead of any online music service available today, and it’s well worth the $5/month. All Access is a nearly flawless product that is an absolute joy to use. MOG, founded in 2005, was essentially a social music portal and advertising network until today. But they’ve been working on this All Access product for well over a year now, hoping at first to provide it free to consumers . But the big music label’s willingness to dabble in free streaming music to consumers is clearly waning – and so MOG was forced to charge users for the service. And I think a lot of users may just be willing to pay for the service once they realize how much better it is than it’s most obvious competitor, MySpace Music . For whatever reason MySpace has been slow to iterate on its year-old service. The service remains slow and buggy. Getting to and listening to music requires more steps than it should. And the advertising is often intrusive. Perhaps it’s the fact that they have to pay every time a user listens to a song, but sometimes it just seems like MySpace Music is trying to slow you down rather and add friction to the music experience. MOG, by contrast, just flies. Searching, discovering, saving and listening to music is intuitive and fun. The social aspects of the service let you share and discover new music with friends. And the user experience will be an inspiration to the next generation of web designers. And as if that wasn’t enough, MOG Radio, a feature of All Access, is just about the coolest thing I’ve ever seen. Or rather, heard. Our complete overview of the service is below. But don’t rely on us, give it a try. MOG is letting people test the service for free for an hour, without any obligation (no credit card required). And we’re also pleased to give 250 TechCrunch readers a one month free membership to MOG All Access. Just email TechCrunch@MOG.com, first come first serve. Overview Of MOG All Access Music Library: MOG has songs from all four major labels: Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, Warner Music Group, and EMI Music. And they also a deep collection of indies as well. If the music is legally available anywhere online, it’ll likely be available on MOG. Overall user experience: Prepare to be shocked. Everything is as it should be. Music is played via a fully controllable pop up window, so you don’t have to stay on the full site. You’ll see album art and information on the song currently being played. Related music is listed below the song, or, if you’re listening to a playlist, other songs on the list. There are no restrictions on skipping or changing songs at all, and the service responds as quickly and crisply as if it were a desktop application. One feature I love – lyrics for whatever song you’re listening to are one click away. Search & Discovery: It’s awesome. Search by artist, album or song. Or a combination. Search is very fast – as I said above, it’s a lot like using a desktop application like iTunes to search for music sitting on your hard drive. And if you can’t think of what you want to listen to, check out the playlists that others have created and made public. MOG ranks them using an algorithm to push the most popular and most played lists to the top. Or find other users who you share music tastes with and follow them. You’ll see what they’re listening to. MOG Radio: This is worth the $5/month alone. If you’re a Pandora fan you’ll know the joy of typing in a song or artist you love and listening to music from other related artists. It’s an amazing way to discover new music. But MOG goes way beyond what Pandora offers. Not only are there no ads and you can skip songs at will without limitations, they let you decide exactly what you want to listen to. Only want to hear David Bowie songs? No problem. Just keep the slider (see image) all the way to the left. But if you want a more Pandora-like experience, slide it to the right and get some Iggy Pop, Queen, Duran Duran and other artists you might like as well. Pandora doesn’t let you just listen to one artist because it changes the nature of their music license from radio to on-demand. MOG doesn’t care because they pay a set fee per user per month to the labels no matter how much music you listen to. So if there’s band you love and don’t want to bother creating a playlist, just type it in, set the music slider to the left, and listen to as much of their music as you want. Library And Playlists: If you stumble onto a song you love, you can one-click save it to your library or put it into a playlist. See more on playlists in our post here . Wish List: As I said, MOG is nearly flawless. But I do have a few requests. First, I’d like to be able to type two or three artists into search and create a radio station on the fly that only plays those artists. MOG says that is something they’re considering. Another request – I’d love it if MOG could scan my iTunes collection and automatically add all those songs and Playlists to my MOG library. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 | |
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