Monday, January 23, 2012

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Nimble Goes After Salesforce, Wants To Be The "Pandora Of Contacts" Top
Jon-Ferrara_largeJon Ferrara thinks Salesforce is doing it wrong when it comes to social. The founder of Goldmine, a CRM company he sold for $100 million nearly a decade ago, is attacking the market a different way with his latest startup, Nimble. "We are effectively Salesforce but social," he says, taking a jab at what is now the 800-pound gorilla. Salesforce would counter that it has Chatter and Radian6, but punching up is always a good way to get noticed (just ask Marc Benioff, who became a billionaire tussling with Microsoft and Oracle). Ferrara just hired away the product director who made Chatter Mobile, Jason McDowall, who will now head up the team building Nimble's mobile apps.
 
Asus Transformer Prime Users Still Reporting Major GPS Issue After Official Fix Top
primeRight on cue, Asus started rolling out Ice Cream Sandwich to Transformer Prime tablets last week. The update not only brought Android 4.0 to the tablet, but also a fix for the lackluster GPS performance. But apparently the GPS is borked for some. Users are still experiencing poor performance and worse yet, some are even stating that the GPS no longer works in ICS when it did prior to the update.
 
Polar Mobile Raises $6 Million For HTML5-Based Publishing Platform, MediaEverywhere Top
polar-mobilePolar Mobile, a digital media platform provider that builds apps for some of the biggest media companies, today announced it has secured an additional $6 million in funding. The new round, led by growth equity firm Georgian Partners, joins more than $3 million invested in the company previously from private investors, bringing its total funding to $9 million. The company is also announcing its plans for a new product line called MediaEverywhere, an HTML5-based content distribution solution for smartphones, tablets and desktops.
 
Cloud Computing Software Company Joyent Raises $85 Million To Pursue Global Growth Top
joyentCloud computing software and service provider Joyent has secured an $85 million round of new funding, the company is announcing today. The round was led by European group Weather Investment II. It also included Telefónica Digital, the growth arm of global telecom giant Telefónica, which participated as a strategic investor.
 
DLD 2012 – Drew Houston: "Yes, Steve Jobs Called Dropbox A Feature" Top
dropboxIn a conversation with WIRED UK's David Rowan on stage at the DLD Conference in Germany, Dropbox CEO Drew Houston acknowledged that he did in fact have a "great meeting" with the late Steve Jobs in 2009. Houston said about the get-together that Jobs had heard of them and asked to meet with him. Even though he was generally gracious, Houston said, Jobs expressed that he felt Dropbox was more of a feature than a product or business and gave him a "bit of a hard time" about that.
 
LG's Quad-Core 2012 Flagship Leaks: The Poorly Code-Named X3 Top
LGX3Other than the LG Spectrum, LG didn't have much to show off by way of phones at this year's CES show. But that doesn't mean that something special isn't in the works. In fact, Pocketnow reports that LG's 2012 flagship will run a Tegra 3 quad-core chipset and go by the name X3, at least for now. The phone likely won't show up on store shelves until spring or summer, but we should hear an announcement (including a retail name) come Mobile World Congress in February.
 
SoundCloud Hits 10 Million Users, Releases New Sounds+Slides Feature Top
20462v2-max-250x250SoundCloud still isn't conforming our story that they recently raised a $50 million round led by Kleiner Perkins - but today at the DLD conference in Munich they have announced a pretty significant milestone - hitting 10 million users. SoundCloud is gunning to be a kind of YouTube for sound, but with a wide variety of apps that can plug into its platform, and a business model which encourages upgrades to a premium paid experience. It competes with the like of Audioboo to some extent, but that is on a much lower 300,000 users and focuses on speech.
 
YouTube Reaches 4 Billion Views Per Day Top
youtube-viewsGoogle's video-sharing property YouTube now sees 4 billion video views per day. That's a 25% increase over the past eight months, the company told Reuters in a report released this morning. There's now approximately 60 hours of video uploaded to the site every minute, compared with roughly 48 hours uploaded in May.
 
DLD 2012 – Brian Chesky: "Average Airbnb Host In NYC Pockets $21,000 A Year" Top
airbnb nycBrian Chesky, co-founder and CEO of Airbnb, took the stage this afternoon at the DLD Conference in Germany for a keynote covering his views about the 'sharing economy'. In terms of news, there isn't much to report based on his talk, but Chesky talked about the fact that sharing used to be an integral part of human life and 'hardwired' into our DNA, that it disappeared after the second World War because of increased consumer spending and individualism, and that we're now at the beginning of the return to sharing. Access, Chesky purports, will eventually become more powerful than ownership again.
 
New RIM CEO: "I Don't Think There Is A Drastic Change Needed" Top
ThorstenHeinsRIM's new CEO Thorsten Heins has only been at the reigns for an evening, but he did a very "BlackBerry" job of presenting himself to the media this morning on his introductory media call. It felt a lot like the media calls of yore, with Balsillie and Lazaridis at the helm. Especially when Heins referred to Apple as "the other fruit company," noting the two companies shared strategy of vertical integration. Unfortunately, vertical integration of software and hardware is about all that these two fruits have in common. Remember folks, Heins is coming off of a four-year stint at RIM. At the relatively young company, Heins worked under founder Mike Lazaridis and his partner in crime Jim Balsillie. That said, you can basically hear Lazaridis-style hubris in Heins' comments. When asked if there was anything Heins wanted to do in the past, but was held back from by his position, Heins confirms that he (along with the freshly removed prior leadership) doesn't see much wrong with RIM.
 
Intel Acquires Fabric Technology InfiniBand From Qlogic For $125M Top
InfiniBand SwitchesIntel is announcing an acquisition today—the company has acquired the InfiniBand business from networking and hosting company Qlogic. Intel says a significant number of the employees associated with this business are expected to accept offers to join the company. The acquisition amount was $125 million in cash. InfiniBand is a fabric technology that provides the communications links for data flow between processors and I/O devices. The scalable technology is used to connect servers in high-performance computing (HPC) environments.
 
Baseline, Accel Put $15M In Online Privacy Certification Company TRUSTe Top
trustOnline privacy certification company TRUSTe has raised $15 million in Series C funding led by Baseline Ventures with existing investors Accel Partners, DAG Ventures and Jafco Ventures participating. This brings TRUSTe's total funding to $37 million. TRUSTe certifies that companies are meeting online privacy standards for consumers. Websites which are certified by the company bear a "trustmark," indicating that the site is secure. TRUSTe says more than 82 percent of consumers who recognize TRUSTe's privacy seal use it to decide how and when to disclose personal information. TRUSTe was actually a not-for-profit venture until 2008 when the company changed its business model.
 
Fantasy Shopper Confirms Its Hottness With $3.3m First Money From Accel And NEA Top
logo (1)Fantasy Shopper is a social shopping game where players discover and share the latest fashion from real-world online and offline retailers. It's gained a lot of traction since it's launch last October, especially amongst women and we've heard on the grapevine that it was piquing the interest of investors for some months since emerging from the European Seed accelerator HackFWD. Today that intense interest has been confirmed with a first round of funding led by top tier venture firms Accel Partners and NEA (one of the key investors in Groupon) to enable it to build out engineering and expand into new cities other than London. With NEA co-leading the investment, clearly there is a big opportunity to scale in US cities and elsewhere. The investment is based on a convertible note not equity, which is standard practise when investors want in fast and the round is hotly contested.
 
Mykonos Helps Companies Battle Hackers, Raises $4 Million Top
mykonosMykonos (the security software company, not the lovely Greek island) has secured $4 million in a Series A funding round led by previous backer Tom Golisano, founder and chairman of Paychex.
 
Clearstream Promises to Bring Transparency to Video Ads Top
clearstreamA new startup called Clearstream says it's time to tame the "Wild West" of online video advertising. According to co-founder Brian Mandelbaum, the idea for the company came from his time at ad agencies including Razorfish and Saatchi & Saatchi. The problem, he says, is that there's no good way to distinguish between the high- and low-quality ad placements. When you buy placement on a video ad network, that ad could be running before a video on a premium site, but it could also be running in a banner on a random website.
 
Report: Olympus In Final Stages Of Negotiations To Partner With Sony Top
olympus logoIt would be a tie-up between two giants: Diamond Weekly, a major Japanese business journal, is reporting [JP] on its website today that scandal-hit Olympus is about to ink a capital and business alliance deal with Sony. Olympus has been under fire for months, after it was revealed the company has covered up large losses for the past 20 years. At some point, Olympus was in danger of getting de-listed at the Tokyo Stock Exchange, but it's now on a 3-year "probation" that requires the company to improve governance. According to Diamond, Olympus' top management has been consulting with various electronics companies but chose Sony as the best partner to help get it out of one the biggest corporate scandals in Japanese history.
 
DLD 2012 – Andrew Mason: Groupon Now Boasts 10,000 Employees, 70% Outside Of The US Top
groupGroupon founder and CEO Andrew Mason was interviewed by Techonomy's David Kirkpatrick on stage at the annual DLD confab in Munich, Germany. Below are my notes - Mason's responses are slightly paraphrased.
 
Cyfe Lets SMBs Monitor Their Business Metrics From One "Command Center" (In Realtime) Top
Screen shot 2012-01-23 at 12.55.43 AMSmall businesses spend up to 80 percent of their time manually collecting data and creating reports on the performance of their services, their customers' activity, or that of their competition. It's a pain in the ass, time consuming, and Deven Patel thinks he's found a simple solution to the problem. This week, Patel launched the open beta of Cyfe, what I like to think of as a "TweetDeck for business analytics", which offers business owners an affordable, web service through which they can easily monitor and share their vital business data and analytics from a single location, in realtime.
 
Hitachi And Mitsubishi Stop Domestic Production Of TVs, Optical Discs Top
Image (1) hitachi_wooo_plasma-620x465.jpg for post 108683Two big Japanese electronics companies, namely Hitachi and Mitsubishi, are to stop producing parts of their product portfolio domestically: Hitachi announced [JP] it will end production of plasma and LCD TVs in Japan, marketed under the Wooo brand, by September this year. The company owns a plant in Gifu prefecture in central Japan that churns out about 100,000 TVs per month (pictured: a Hitachi Wooo plasma from 2009). Citing price competition in the TV business as the main reason for the move, Hitachi said the plant will be used to produce projectors and chips instead.
 
Cash-Starved Ambient Industries Folds Location Browser App Flook Top
flookNearly two years ago, Ambient Industries raised capital to boost development and marketing of its iPhone app Flook, a location-based social discovery application. Alas, they never got the kind of traction needed to develop a business model solid enough to make money from the app. Yesterday, the people behind Flook sent an email to users announcing that the app will be retired "some time in the next 30 days" (after February 25th).
 

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