Loopt, a location aware social network has changed its economic model. According to Venture Beat, the cost of accessing GPS data has been very prohibitive and a problem in selling the application to carriers.
To solve this problem, Loopt has reached deals with Qualcomm and SiRF for unlimited dips of GPS data for a flat fee. This was announced at MobileBeat 2008 today.
ContextWeb a leading company at providing high-precision, real time contextual ad solutions and operator of ADSDAQ has closed its Series D round of funding at $26 million as reported. The round was led by Investor growth Capital along with participation from existing investors namely; Draper Fisher Jurvetson, DFJ Gotham Ventures, Updata Partners, DFJ New England and Gold Hill Capital. This current raise takes the over all funding of the company to $54 million.
CEO of ContextWeb, Anand Subramanian commented:
We had reviewed 12seconds last month. With the sole purpose of facilitating and entertaining its users, the newly incubated short video messaging service allows its users to record and share short video messages. The service has launched its public alpha version today, and it is now available for everyone. We have got 100 invites exclusively for StartupMeme readers. (See the bottom of the post to grab one).
Majority of people think Seesmic and Qik as a video equivalent of twitter, but 12seconds is incomparable. The character limitations set by twitter (14 characters) excellently describes 12seconds only because the number of uploaded videos on other services are several minutes long and therefore do not fall in the category of True Twitter Video.
Steve Ballmer must have had scratched his baldness head when Yahoo/Microsoft deal failed, got a new life and then ended with Yahoo’s teaming with Google. And not just that failed team-up with Icahn that got a no from Yahoo in the most direct manner, Ballmer still roars in at defending Microsoft Corps need to flood its wealth into major investments as reported.
Steve Ballmer’s message was pretty straight forward and he made sure he left no doubts when it came to speaking about a deal with Yahoo:
Microsoft Corp. has announced its intention to acquire DATAllegro Inc., which is a breakthrough data warehouse appliances provider. If the deal is done, it will enhance the mission critical data platform ability of Microsoft. This will make it a lot easier and cost efficient for all sort of customers in order to control and get an insight from the amount of data produced by and for businesses, employees and consumers.
They say when you go poor you tie stone to your tummy to help you put up with hunger, but AOL is doing so throw out extra weight as it prepares for a sell off. What does it mean? Simply that AOL has decided to cut out its services and as a result is putting a halt to its services.
AOL EVP, Kevin Conroy stated that AOL plans at shutting down its services that are non-performing as reported by TC. This is lieu of an email sent by Kevin to his staff that mentioned the restructuring of AOL. The services that have been eclipsed by the shutdown include: XDrive, AOL Pictures, Bluestring and MyMobile.
Microsoft and Facebook have reached an agreement according to which both the companies will enhance their advertising partnership. The prior will have an equity stake of $240 million in Facebook’s upcoming round of financing at a valuation of $15 billion. With this deal, Microsoft will be Facebook’s third party exclusive advertising platform partner.
Furthermore the software and service solution provider will start selling ads for the social network in the U.S. as well as world wide.
Fox Weather lets you check on the latest weather reports and predictions through Google Maps. The controls are overlayed on the Maps, which makes it very simple to use. Apart from current conditions and warnings, you can also check for severe weather and hurricanes.
The HiDef Radar is the most useful feature of this all, as you can view weather reports in TV style, without having to actually watch TV. You can watch the weather changed unfold through animations. Although this feature only works for the US.
For a company that has all the business to no worry about a cutback in users, the idea of shutting down support for a service they provide sounds absurd; and when we say the word, Yahoo pops out screaming with its latest ‘make me the headline’ news. What is that? Yahoo plans at cutting out support for its music store.
The report says that customers won’t be able to revive frozen tracks or move working ones to a new storage location, the reason being that Yahoo won’t be providing keys to the songs DRM. All this in simpler terms means that if you have got some music from Yahoo and you plan to at making changes to your system even if it’s your operating system; say goodbye to all that music.
If you’re a Twitter user, you must have observed drop in number of your friends/followers. Recently Twitter made a decision according to which they would be stepping up their Twitter spammer detection, but things went the other way as the algorithm made the service go wild. As a result, friends and followers in the twitter account disappeared. One way or the other, the service becomes useless and causes frustration among its users.
At the beginning of this week, ZDNet also reported that the micro blogging service users were not able to add followers thanks. Even in some cases the follower limits went to a 1:1 Twitter ratio.
