Tuesday, March 29, 2011

Y! Alert: TechCrunch

Yahoo! Alerts
My Alerts

The latest from TechCrunch

Behold The World's Largest Photo Ever Taken Indoor: 40 Gigapixels Of Awesome Top
We interrupt our live coverage of breaking news about Internet companies from around the world to point you to this phenomenal 360-degrees photo (okay, actually it’s 2,947 pictures stitched together). It is, to our and the photographer’s knowledge, the largest photo ever taken indoor with 280,000 x 140,000 pixels of awesomesauce. In the screenshot above, in the painting on the ceiling, do you see that angel holding a book, right below the cross? No worries if you can’t, because I zoomed in to give you a close-up: That’s how freaking amazing this picture is. The photo was taken by photographer and 360cities founder Jeffrey Martin, and shows the interior of the magnificent, 18th-century baroque library you can find inside the Strahov Monastery in Prague, Czech Republic. For more background, head on over to Wired . The details, for the fans, courtesy of Martin: The photo is 40 gigapixels (4000 megapixels); 280,000 x 140,000 pixels; made of 2947 images joined together; used a Canon 550D and 200mm lens; print size 23m x 11m; stitched file size 280GB; cut into 85,000 tiles for web delivery. Okay, okay – one more:
 
Inspiring: Kik Founder Donates $1M To Kickstart University of Waterloo Seed Fund Top
The founder of messaging app Kik , 23-year-old entrepreneur Ted Livingston , has donated $1 million to The University of Waterloo’s VeloCity Residence , a residence-based mobile and digital startups incubator ( dormcubator? ) where his own startup ambitions were sparked . The University of Waterloo will now also establish a $1 million seed fund for student startups and intends to provide “at least 30 student ventures” with $25,000 as well as four months of office space, incorporation services and mentoring over the next few years. According to the press release announcing the donation, the $25,000 awards match the amount of money left to Livingston by his grandfather – money that apparently kept Kik afloat and fuelled the company's development in its earliest days. Livingston, who studied mechatronics engineering at Waterloo between 2005 and 2009, founded Kik (then called Unsynced) while in the VeloCity residence in Winter 2009. As we reported, Kik recently raised $8 million in Series A funding. Indeed, the $1 million donation to the University of Waterloo was made possible by Livingston selling some of his personal Kik shares in that round to one of three VC investors (in order to prevent further dilution of other Kik employees' shares). It’s an inspiring move, so I’ll leave you with a quote from Livingston to chew on: "With few responsibilities and surrounded by other talented minds, UW students are uniquely positioned to start world-changing companies. Unfortunately, few investors are willing to bet on young entrepreneurs, especially in Canada, so getting the start-up funds they need is a huge challenge. This fund is a step towards changing that." Kudos, buddy, kudos. (Photograph by Dave Chidley for National Post, via The Gazette ) CrunchBase Information Kik Interactive Information provided by CrunchBase
 
These Robot Quadrocopter Jugglers Perform For Your Amusement… For Now Top
If you’ve watched some of our previous robotic quadrocopter coverage you’ll have seen these little choppers fly through hoops and interact with humans in fairly mundane ways. Now I’d like you to watch this video of two quadrocopters sharing a nice game of catch. They target the ball and throw it back to the thrower and once you have two in the same pen they start throwing the balls to each other. The result? Mirth and merriment! Read more…
 
Apperian Raises $9.5M For Enterprise Mobile App Deployment Platform Top
Enterprise mobility company Apperian has raised $9.5 million in new funding from North Bridge Venture Partners, Bessemer Venture Partners, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers' iFund, CommonAngels and LaunchCapital. This brings Apperian’s total funding to $11 million. As more companies turn to tablets and smartphones in enterprise communications, standard consumer apps may not fit within security requirements. Launched by former Apple employees in 2009, Apperian helps developers accelerate app creation within the enterprise. The startup’s EASE platform lets IT administrators deploy, provision and manage mobile apps in a secure environment. Currently EASE supports development for iOS devices and will integrate Android support soon. Apperian has developed apps for Clinique, Newsday, and RueLaLa. CrunchBase Information Apperian Information provided by CrunchBase CrunchBase Information Apperian Information provided by CrunchBase
 
Cisco Buys Cloud Automation And Management Software Company newScale Top
Cisco this morning announced its intent to acquire newScale , a global provider of self-service and lifecycle management software for enterprise IT and private/hybrid cloud computing. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but newScale is a company that's raised tens of millions of dollars in funding from a wide range of investors , according to CrunchBase. Based in San Mateo, California, newScale develops products and solutions that enable companies to select and deploy cloud services within their businesses, allowing them to initiate the provisioning of their own systems and infrastructure on an as-needed basis.
 
Glassdoor Puts Numbers on Our Schizophrenic Job Market Top
Glassdoor is reporting an Employment Confidence Survey today that shows robust and increasing confidence in the job market– never mind most of the nation remains gripped in 9% unemployment with only a little hope of things getting better. 40% of respondents expect their company’s outlook to improve in the next six months and just 17% are concerned about a possible layoff, down from 26% in the first quarter of 2009. And there’s decent optimism that should they lose their jobs, 40% of them say it is “likely” they would find a new job matching their experience and pay within six months– the highest that number has been in six quarters. Glassdoor notes that “only” 35% of respondents expected to get a raise within the next 12 months, but given the top line economic data for the country, that still seems pretty healthy to me. While unemployment is getting better, the numbers say as much about who uses Glassdoor as anything else. While millions of Americans seem trapped on the less-desirable side of a skills-to-jobs-available mismatch, there’s a full-on talent war going on in Silicon Valley, where not only engineers but talented startup executives and worker bees are flooded with offers. Culprits for this talent bubble are certainly companies like Google and Facebook and Zynga who are hiring large numbers of employees as fast as they can, but also to blame is the relative ease of starting a company and getting funding– which takes an increasing number of engineers and potential CTOs and managers out of the job market. To wit: According to Glassdoor, more than one-third of employees expect to leave their job in the next three years, 28% expect to do so in the next two years and 14% expect to leave in less than one year. Add it up and nearly 60% of respondents in what’s supposed to be one of the worst labor markets in our nation’s history plan to voluntarily leave their jobs in less than three years. It’s a stunning picture of a whole different kind of dysfunction in America’s job market. Typically even if you feel your job isn’t a risk, the fear of shrinking options makes most people clamp on to whatever job they have. But in this market, while millions lose their houses, those on the other side of that skills/need labor chasm have the world as their oyster and there’s little-to-no sense of clinging to your port in a storm. It’s another sign of how deeply a sense of employee/employer loyalty has eroded in our country in the last few decades. When my generation was coming out of college in the late 1990s, the idea of job hopping every few years was still a radical invention of the so-called “new economy,” but now it’s just how someone plans a career. Part of this comes from employees: Entrepreneurship isn’t just mainstream in Silicon Valley, increasingly most professionals run their careers as if they’re free-agents, merely tied up in contracts from time to time. But it’s also the fault of employers. The rabidly-short term nature of the stock market has dramatically changed how companies view layoffs. Decades ago, layoffs were considered a last resort of a dying — or at the very least unprofitable– company. Today, they are a regular way to trim the fat, compensate for poor hiring decisions and meet quarterly numbers. Is it any wonder a dramatic shift in the use of layoffs has coincided with a dramatic shift in employee loyalty? Companies gripped in the talent-war side of this economy are no doubt struggling to keep their best people. In the Valley this has taken the form of increasingly large retention bonuses, salaries and perks, and every single tech company will tell you that hanging on to employees is their number one risk factor. Part of this is the healthy churn of employees through the Valley’s ranks that keeps startups as competitive as the big companies. But part of it is in-demand employees’ revenge for decades of being increasingly expendable. Glassdoor’s numbers also show another sharp divide in the labor market around gender lines. While nearly 40% of men are optimistic about a pay raise, only 30% of women are. Glassdoor ran the numbers for engineers and found good reason why: Women still make far less money than men. The cap ranges between 4% and 9%, getting larger as men and women become more experienced. That’s not too surprising given numbers that show gender parity in low-levels of management in the US, but that shifting dramatically as women climb the economic ladder. In the Valley, the gap is far less than the  20% gender pay gap nationwide, but it’s worrying for a place that prides itself on being a meritocracy nonetheless. Mike is coming in town today. Who votes I demand a huge raise? (Photo by Thomas Hawk)
 
Will Amazon Drive Music Lockers Like MP3Tunes And mSpot Beyond Oblivion? Top
Make no mistake about it: the digital music space will be turned upside down this year, courtesy of giants like Apple , Google , HP , Sony and now, Amazon . Earlier today, the latter announced that it was entering the world of digital music locker services with a bang, introducing services dubbed Cloud Drive and Cloud Player that basically let you store your digital music – and more – in the cloud and stream it from browsers on any computer as well as from Android phones. A lot of the virtual ink that’s already been spilled on the unveiling of those services has understandably focused on the battle between the giants cited above, but I can’t help but wonder how this will impact the many startups in the space, namely the likes of mSpot , MP3Tunes , Maestro.fm , Orb , MiMedia and Audiogalaxy (not to mention the yet-to-launch Beyond Oblivion , which has raised close to $90 million from News Corp and others). I decidedly left out companies offering digital music subscription and discovery services such as Rdio, MOG, Pandora, Spotify and Grooveshark, because I think that’s a different ballgame. Just looking at storage prices for the two better known startups in the music locker space, MP3Tunes and mSpot, I seriously doubt anyone will still find those appealing when you put their offering next to that of Amazon and its Cloud Drive. What you get for free Amazon: 5 GB of storage MP3Tunes: 2 GB of storage mSpot: 2 GB of storage Pricing for additional storage: Amazon: 20 GB for $20 per year (or just buy a single album from its MP3 store) MP3Tunes: 20 GB for $19.95 per year mSpot: no option for 20 GB Amazon: 50 GB for $50 per year MP3Tunes: 50 GB for $39.95 per year (or $4.95 per month) mSpot: 40 GB for $3.99 per month (which equals $47.88 per year) In other words, as soon as you need way more than 20 GB, you just might still be better off sticking with the startups than making the switch to Amazon Cloud Drive, but how many people genuinely need more than that for storing digital files (Amazon points out 20 GB comes down to about 4,000 songs and 8,000 photos already)? And even if 5 GB worth of free storage doesn’t cut it for you, remember that MP3Tunes only offers 2 GB of free storage if you put up with advertising. Also, at least for now, upgrading to 20 GB of storage on Amazon’s Cloud Drive costs you about $3.99 for a whole year if you just buy a cheap album from Amazon’s MP3 store , while it will cost you about five times as much to get that kind of storage on MP3Tunes (and about the same price on mSpot if you’d cut their price for 40 GB in half). On a side note: amusingly, MP3Tunes currently even advertises the lower pricing of its new rival on its own website (see screenshot below). To conclude, with this pricing scheme Amazon has made it extremely difficult for MP3Tunes and mSpot to compete with them. Also consider that Amazon has a lot of brand leverage, a wealth of cloud infrastructure expertise and a potentially huge user base from the get-go (courtesy of its popular MP3 store, which is second in the US only to Apple’s iTunes). Sure, music store on Amazon’s Cloud Drive can not be played on iOS devices at this point, but as MG Siegler points out there’s already a work-around for that. Amazon just beat Google and Apple to market with its music locker service (which, again, also works for documents, videos and photos) but has it also priced music locker startups squarely out of that market at the same time? I’ve asked mSpot and MP3Tunes for comment but haven’t heard back yet. CrunchBase Information MP3Tunes mSpot Amazon Information provided by CrunchBase
 

CREATE MORE ALERTS:

Auctions - Find out when new auctions are posted

Horoscopes - Receive your daily horoscope

Music - Get the newest Album Releases, Playlists and more

News - Only the news you want, delivered!

Stocks - Stay connected to the market with price quotes and more

Weather - Get today's weather conditions




You received this email because you subscribed to Yahoo! Alerts. Use this link to unsubscribe from this alert. To change your communications preferences for other Yahoo! business lines, please visit your Marketing Preferences. To learn more about Yahoo!'s use of personal information, including the use of web beacons in HTML-based email, please read our Privacy Policy. Yahoo! is located at 701 First Avenue, Sunnyvale, CA 94089.
Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)