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Xobni, the email service company has grabbed $7 million in the second round of funding. The round was led by Cisco and was participated by the existing investors including Khosla Ventures, First Round Capital, Baseline Ventures, and Atomico.
According to Xobni, the amount raised will be used to:
keep pushing our innovation on uncovering and leveraging all the amazing information and relationships locked up in our overloaded inboxes, particularly in Microsoft Outlook, the most utilized inbox in the world.
In a twist of fate, apparently Valleywag editor Owen Thomas reported Jimmy Wales as out of his job from Wikipedia. The co-founder was brought back to his desk by a reply from Wikimedia Foundation’s director of communications Sue Gardner, that Wales was “absolutely” not out of his job.
This’s Saturday’s actual report by Thomas:
Imagine an online encylopedia anyone can edit — and no one can run. Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia’s…cofounder, is no longer a board member of the site’s nonprofit foundation. Who’s in charge here?
Gardner responded by saying that there’s nothing to the speculation, and Jimmy is a much-valued board member of the Wikimedia Foundation, expected to hold that role permanently.
Twitter is once again the subject under highlight but this time on a different note: apparently there’s a scam spreading over the micro-blogging service. Direct Messages AKA DMs are sent to Twitter accounts with a URL consisting of a site on blogspot.com, where the text reads something like so:
hey! check out this funny blog about you…
The URL redirects you to a similar page as Twitter’s login, and steals your login information, as well as sends the same scam-message to your Twitter list. The scam is under the URL of: twitter.access-logins.com, so beware, you have been warned!
LG Electronics recently launched its line of HDTVs in the USA that apparently carry direct receiving capability of Internet video, in addition to satellite and cable signals. This would mean that owners would no longer need a separate device like a video game console or DVD player/set-top box to acquire Internet access.
Tim Alessi – director of Product Development at LGE stated that LG’s LCD and Plasma TVs titled as Broadband HDTVs will be on shelves for around $300. Though this does not mean that owners would be able to browse the Internet freely, as the memory in the TVs are not sufficient for this task - instead one can have access to video sites such as Netflix. Netflix chief executive Reed Hastings states:
It’s hugely symbolic.
The holy grail has always been to give the TV an Internet jack in addition to the cable jack. It’s an early glimpse of the long-term future.
As Sony’s Bravia TVs now have Internet with the addition of a separate module and with Samsung & Panasonic not far behind - LG hopes to up competition by adding Internet browsing capabilities to its line of HDTVs soon.
Bernie Madoff was accused of creating a $50 billion scheme that apparently landed him in jail, though reports came in recently, stating that his employees are still going to work as usual. Except that employees are doing no work and still getting paid, reports New York Post.
It seems like three weeks after Madoff’s house arrest (for punking his clients), the only reason could be that the employees were collectable victims of the swindling, and as the photo above shows, are selling gifts given to them by Madoff, on eBay. Apparently a statement was recorded by an employee providing an insight to the situation:
It’s pretty bad.
We can’t conduct any business. We basically get there at 9, hang around, and go home at 5. It’s surreal. It’s also scary, because we don’t know what’s going on.
This new year hasn’t been so great for many as recession has struck misery all over the globe – news of ad holding company WPP Group laying-off employees doesn’t sound like a nice tune as well. The WPP Group plans to make job cuts at its global agencies, especially in North America and Western Europe - with numbers going in the thousands. The critical decisions were passed after budget meetings were held during the last two months.
The current ‘Recession’ has effected almost each and every business around the globe, thrusting companies to make job and pay cuts. The industry under highlight this time is the publications, particularly the U.K. Newspapers; which have been taking a beating since past few months, with as many as 1,000-plus job cuts combined.
This year around it’s not expected to get any better, only worse lies ahead and the blame-finger points at the decline in advertising. The adverse effect of the downturn in the ad-industry has sent a shiver down the newspapers, and more lay-offs are likely to continue this year - moreover, small newspaper groups are likely to continue shutting down as well.
Pictela will be launching its beta service any time soon but before that it has got a boost with Dave Morgan’s support, the founder and CEO of TACODA. Pictela is an online platform for both brands and publishers and will be made available too the public in a few months. Apart from being backed by Dave Moran, it is also funded by Avalon Ventures.
Amidst Mail.ru’s plans to IPO this year, Tiger Global Management hedge fund sold its 27 percent stake in the company. The stakes were sold to existing shareholders Digital Sky Technologies and Naspers. This certainly shakes up Mail.ru’s original $2 billion valuation, as DST now controls a majority stake in the company.
After being reported dead and then coming back to life, the JPG Magazine is now on the verge of sale. The potential buyers include Flickr, Smugmug and Alexander Muser among the two dozen or so in line.We aren’t sure how much price the Magazine is going for but it appears that Flickr might just pocket it, given that most of the photographs are from the image sharing site.
Facebook pulled down its polling tool from its site. The tool enabled users to create polls focusing on target audience has been removed and the link takes you back to the homepage. The team confirmed that they had taken the polls off for some technical issues:
The ability to create Facebook Polls is no longer available on the public site, though users may still receive Facebook Polls created internally by Facebook. Facebook is exploring options for making a polling product publicly available again in the future but has no definite plans to discuss at this point.
A favicon is a small icon that is displayed in the tab/address bar of a browser and it helps in identifying sites. Now you can see the number of unread Gmail messages on the favicon. All you have to do is to install the Greasemonkey extension of the Firefox which can be downloaded for free.
The Greasemonkey user script helps display the number of unread messages in the Gmail. The numbers get brighter as the unread messages increases. Maximum ten unread messages can be displayed at a time.
Image source: lifehacker
There hasn’t been much noise from Palm for quite some time and the aging Palm will be releasing its Nova OS based device this Thursday (perhaps). The device will have a sliding keyboard and to top that the phone upon launch will have a lot to offer in the software section upon launch. Let’s see what the device really is when it is revealed at the CES.
A wacky invention for beer-holics – made by a beer fan himself (obviously). The Serv O’Beer is an invention out of the box by a ‘Polymythic’, using a Construx building set as the base for carrying the bottle, and an ioBridge for controls. The invention stirs up beer pretty good, as the video demonstrates.
Invitation only music streaming site Spotify
, (Currently available only to the European nations) is a new startup with a promise. The new site has a variety of music for users to listen to with a downloadable client to help them do that.
Streaming beyond today’s browser based music streaming sites, think of Spotify as a fully stocked iTunes, with everything hyperlinked to easily find related music. I just love the user interface very very much and the best part is that of making stream based playlists is as easy as ABC.
You might be asking, how to try it out if you live in the US, worry not follow this guide:
Invite yourself from anywhere:
1) go to http://www.daveproxy.co.uk/
2) enter the following URL: https://www.spotify.com/en/get-started/
3) Create your account, for UK postcode - check http://www.postcodesearch.org.uk/
Try it out and leave your comments…
SkyGrid the news aggregator service currently charges $500/month a browser based premium real time news service that competes with super-profitable Bloomberg terminals and other services. SkyGrid enables you to massively collect, filter news from blogs, websites and different channels with using advanced algorithms to detect sentiments as well for the items.
But we have heard rumors that the company is us also going to come out with a FREE version soon.
The ranking based system is too good, and I personally believe that bloggers in particular would deeply benefit out of the system.
There shouldn’t be any doubts when it comes to using the keyboard shortcuts compared to dragging the mouse all over the screen. Keeping that in mind Mozilla has released Tabhunter extension that lets you quickly search through the countless tabs in your browser. Just hit Ctrl + Alt + T (shortcut) to open a search box and type in what you are looking for, Tabhunter displays results that best match your query. It’s definitely going to save me a lot of time!
We have been hearing rumors of Apple coming out with a RED colored iPhone similar to its launch of the RED iPod for quite some times.
But recently during the holiday season, the rumors have got much more hype, that the MACWORLD would showcase this product in conjunction with Apple releasing the iPhone under the Product RED brand and surely a lot of folks would buy one thinking its for a good cause (money for the Global Fund to fight AIDS in Africa).
What do you think, will Tuesday morning give us a surprise?
BeeJiveIM, the famous instant messaging app for the iPhone will be rolling out its 2.0 version for the iPhone. No matter what new features the update brings it wont be reducing the price by even a cent. The new features include ease of image transfer between the iPhone and the PC along with the ability to save speech notes, just in case you find typing in difficult and slow. Perhaps the best improvement is the active syncing it provides between your iPhone and the computer that ease address book sharing, file transfers, etc. The price is definitely way too much compared to other IM apps, but at the end of the day, IM addicts will find that the app is worth what it costs.
[image with thanks]
