Google only recently announced its own Venture Capital Funds and there come out rumors of a possible Google acquisition of an Arab startup. The rumor comes hurtling from Arab Crunch which hasn’t mentioned the name of this lucky Jordanian startup, but says that the deal can be worth millions. The deal is still in process, meaning we all have to wait for the official confirmation from Google. I personally think this is going to be an obvious move from the giant in the Web sphere as the Arab world is pretty promising when it comes to both innovation and advertising revenue. I am keen to have this rumor become a reality.
Archive for March, 2009
Google sets foot into the venture funds by initiating its own Google Ventures. The Venture is dedicated to searching and providing assistance to promising startups. These startups spread to a wide category including those associated to consumer Internet, clean tech, health-care, etc. This is a good move, one that will help Google direct its wealth at supporting innovation.
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At last, Microsoft has realized that it just can’t bear the burden of Encarta, the digital encyclopedia it launched more than a decade back (1993). Although it enjoyed significant success early on, Encarta has continued to fall back. The reason being the information it has is not up to date and more importantly the Wikipedia provides a much more diverse and in depth knowledge of almost everything there is to know of. The Encarta website will be taken off on October 31 worldwide, except for Japan where the date has been extended to December 31, 2009. Microsoft will also cease to sell Encarta products by June. So what about all the data? I think it has a quite a lot to offer to Wikipedia as a sign of generosity, one way of keeping the name going.
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Facebook is loading up itself with all new Flash client libraries as it announces its partnership with Adobe. This would help developers to easily utilize the Facebook Platform with the aid of Flash. This makes, ActionScript 3.0 Client Library the fourth suported client library in the Facebook Platform’s armory after the iPhone, JavaScript and PHP ones. You can download the script from here.
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Kickapps has taken all the time it could to finally embrace Facebook Connect and OpenID. This comes after Kickapps announced major partnerships earlier that include names those with Akamai, Clearspring and Userplane. This would ease out the process of registering for clients who are already using either of the two services and Kickapps will automatically import data from the clients profiles on Facebook and MySpace. The idea of taking advantage of the much popular social networking platforms is definitely a clever move by Kickapps.
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Looks like all the patiencehas finally proven worth it as Skype makes its way into your iPhone with Skype for iPhone. The app will be available for free by the middle of this week and would let users make VoIP calls using WiFi. The app will also let you lookup for contacts who are already using Skype on their iPhones, as well as letting you chat with contacts on your Skype.
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If you are a celebrity or are rich enough to pay someone for tweeting on your behalf then Twitter has got the right thing for you. Twitter has listed a new job opening at JobScore for hiring VIP caretakers. The job description? Well the gist of it says the person who is hired will have to use Twitter in every effective way to satisfy celebrities on Twitter happy. Interested? You can read further to see if you are fit enough for it (or can take the pressure of loads of celebrity gossip).
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We had earlier covered RefSeek, the search engine for the academics has seen a few updates recently. The latest update lets RefSeek deliver better results from an even larger number of books, encyclopedias and other sources. The results will also have image results alongside the search, each of these images are filtered to have suitable ones to be viewed in classrooms. Let’s see how RefSeek further develops and turns into a major academic search engine.
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