Tuesday, November 2, 2010

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Google Voice Is Having Serious Trouble Making Outbound Calls. This Is Bad. Top
If you want to be a phone company you can’t go dead . Ever. People rely on their mobile phones for everything these days, so when calls aren’t going through it’s a really big deal. And as far as we can tell, Google Voice is currently having some serious issues. Both Michael Arrington and I use Google Voice exclusively for our phone calls. And this morning, we simply can’t place calls: we’ll dial a number, hear the familiar rings as we wait for our contact to answer, and… nothing. The phone just keeps ringing forever — it never even gets to the recipient’s voicemail. The worst part of this is that most people probably don’t even realize that anything’s wrong, because when you initiate a call  it sounds like everything is working fine because you still hear those familiar rings. We’ve tried a handful of different setups to figure out what’s going on. We’re both on Nexus Ones, so it’s possible (though unlikely) that the problem is associated with this handset in particular. When we place a call directly from our Nexus Ones, it actually does go through to the recipient, but it comes from a random number and when they go to pick up they hear silence. We also tried initiating a call using Google Voice’s web interface (you enter the phone number you want to call, and it calls both your phone and your contact’s phone). This doesn’t work at all. The only thing that does seem to work is Google Voice’s integration with Gmail. Which is great if you’re sitting at a computer, and useless if not. The only consolation is that inbound calls are still working. Google is looking into the problem, and while it doesn’t seem to be affecting all users, there are clearly a significant number of people having this problem. This isn’t the first time Google Voice has had issues with reliability — it had a major outage back in April 2008, when it was still GrandCental. I’ve also encountered sporadic problems over the last year that I’ve used it (though no worse than I had with AT&T).
 
Following Zynga's Footsteps, EA Signs Five Year Deal With Facebook To Use Credits Top
Following in the footsteps of Zynga, Electronic Arts has just announced that it has entered into a five-year strategic relationship with Facebook. Similar to the Zynga deal, Facebook Credits will become the exclusive payment method in EA games on Facebook. EA, which owns Zynga competitor Playfish, will enter into a 70-30 percent revenue share for Facebook Credits, according to a release. Playfish operates a number of popular social games on Facebook, MySpace, Hi5, and other social networks, including Pet Society, Restaurant City, Country Story and Who Has The Biggest Brain? Pet Society and Restaurant City are two of the top 10 games on Facebook measured by daily active users, and EA also operates soccer and football games on the social network. Other Facebook games under the EA brand include Monopoly and Pogo. While EA is giving 30 percent of its Credits revenues to Facebook, it’s likely that the company has cute a better deal on advertising with the social network, as was rumored to be the case with the Zynga deal. EA’s relatively late to the to the Credits game considering its presence in the social gaming ecosystem. Zynga’s deal was announced in the Spring of this year, and Playdom , CrowdStar and RockYou signed similar partnerships in July. I’m also wondering if this announcement could somehow be related to a rumored new social gaming portal that Facebook is set to announce in mid-November. CrunchBase Information Playfish Information provided by CrunchBase
 
#Founders Becomes An Overnight Must-attend, As Europe's Startup Circuit Accelerates Top
Something has been happening to the European startup scene in the last couple of years, and it is starting to manifest itself in an upswell of networking the likes of which I have not seen since I started blogging full time for TechCrunch way back in 2007. From the primordial soup of the developer community have sprung up events for startups, entrepreneurs and investors until, finally, last weekend Europe stumbled on the natural evolution of all this networking: an event which resembled and will perhahps come to rival The Lobby event in Hawaii. That’s an event where tech entrepreneurs gather to talk just amongst themselves for a change, and hang out . And that’s exactly what F.ounders , a new invite-only event in Dublin, did this past weekend. But let me unpack this trend.
 
Smaato: U.S. Will Spend $5 Billion On Mobile Advertising In 2015 Top
Mobile advertising and ad optimization company Smaato is releasing a new whitepaper today with some huge projections for the mobile advertising industry. According to Smaato, the US is the second largest mobile advertising market globally in terms of spending, falling just behind Japan. In 2010, Smaato says US mobile advertising spending is expected to be worth $797.6 million. For the US, this equates to a little under 8,000 mobile advertising campaigns, and an average of 21.8 new campaigns per day. Smatto says that the U.S. mobile ad market will move closer to Japan (more than $1 billion in 2010) next year with a forecast of $1.24 billion for 2011 and $5.04 billion for 2015. eMarketer released similar findings a few weeks ago, but Smaato’s finding are more bullish on projections for 2015. Here’s the reasoning. The company says that US has over 300 million active mobile subscriptions, of which, almost one-third use their mobile phone to browse. This number is only expected to grow in the next few years. Because of the high number of mobile users, the average mobile advertising campaign spend is between $75,000 – 100,000, which is much higher than in other countries. And the report contends that the mobile advertising market is is still young and has not fully matured. Smaato says that mobile has yet to penetrate over 50% of the US mobile population in terms of advertising. As smartphone usage increases, interact rates will increase and advertisers will be more willing to shell out ad dollars. While it’s still difficult to know just how huge mobile advertising will become, we do know that the market seems to be growing at a fast rate as technology giants like Apple and Google throw their hats in the ring via acquisitions. Steady increases in the use of smartphones, new innovations in mobile ad formats and other factors are all contributing to market that is growing like gangbusters. CrunchBase Information Smaato Information provided by CrunchBase
 
Here's The Cloud Computing Company Dell Is Buying: Boomi Top
Dell has just announced it has agreed to acquire Software-as-a-Service integration company Boomi . Terms of the deal were not disclosed and, as usual, the purchase is subject to customary closing conditions. Dell did not say when it expects to complete the purchase of the startup. Dell chairman and CEO Michael Dell had yesterday teased the press about an impending acquisition in the cloud computing space (see Reuters ). The comment, made at an event in Hong-Kong, sparked a guessing game among tech reporters, but it turns out Dell is picking up a rather small company – Boomi has raised only $4 million in venture capital according to CrunchBase. Nevertheless, it’s a startup that does offer a compelling SaaS platform for many a company. Boomi offers an application integration platform, dubbed Atomsphere , which aims to help its clients reduce the cost and complexity of integrating applications by allowing easy transfer of data between cloud-based and on-premise applications. The company says its solution removes the need for appliances, software or even coding. Headquartered in Berwyn, Pennsylvania, Boomi says its solutions are used with the world's leading cloud-based apps, including Salesforce CRM , as well as financial (QuickBooks, Zuora), human resources (Taleo), content and service-desk management (NetSuite). Boomi says it manages “millions of transactions” a month and has completed “tens of thousands of cloud integrations” for “hundreds of customers” globally. The acquisition marks Dell’s third this year – it had earlier bought Ocarina Networks and Exanet . It also lost a high-stake bidding war with HP for storage company 3PAR. CrunchBase Information Boomi Dell Information provided by CrunchBase
 
Try Out Part Of Google TV In Your Browser Right Now Top
A good chunk of Google TV runs inside a browser. Besides the main menu, everything else like the search, web apps, and a lot more are simply webpages and search queues. This means that you can essentially try out the service — or integrate some of it into your HTPC — right now. This hit me shortly after I posted our full review and I managed to grab the URLs of two of Google TV’s main products: TV Search & Spotlight. Google TV Search is the platform’s secret sauce and would be crazy useful outside of the product, but alas, those URLs seem to self destruct after a few quick minutes. Still, most people are smarter than I, so I pasted the link below anyway, with the hope someone can deconstruct them and find out something useful. Just don’t bother navigating to it, it won’t show the awesome search tool. Read More
 

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