Archive for October, 2009
I won’t be surprised if many a musicians in times to come will be using the iPhone or the iPod Touch to make music. Why do I think that? Well there is one music app after another coming up and the latest ones are from GrooveMaker released GrooveMaker Electro and D’n'B. The two apps enable anyone to create their own tracks and be a DJ on their own. So if you had that groovy thing in you that was waiting to jump out, GrooveMaker has the right apps for you to let your musical soul out and create full length songs in a matter of minutes. The interface itself is pretty impressive and looks much like your portable DJ Box, with 8 stereo loop tracks and a huge library of numerous drum beats, effects and lines to make your remix ever more groovy. Apart from the paid apps, you can also use the fully functional GrooveMaker’s free version as well.
Offerpal Media has been busy making progress over last couple of years with major partnerships and launch of new services. Today however it made an announcement on a major achievement, on crossing 160 Million users and over 730 Billion Virtual Points it has issued. Offerpal Media launched in 2007 and almost immediately became the online gaming industries first offer based monetization platform. The network itself has grown substantially since then with over 2,000 publishers globally and its pretty popular given that it relieves the developers of the need to manage multiple user accounts and helps them focus on developing and managing their games and web pages. Below are some things it has achieved in the last two years:
The idea of Software as a Service has got quite a lot of air as more and more services step in to provide management and other services online. PaintBox is another startup working on the SaaS model, providing users with a platform to effectively manage customer relations and knowledge assets. It provides you a one stop solution to your needs associated to office work, from managing contacts, projects and products to maintaining documents and orders. The interface is quite simple to use but pretty effective and I guess a 45 day trial would definitely be enough to have you using it for a longer time to come. So if you are looking for an easy to use management system then PaintBox is definitely going to be a favorite for you.
ComScore, the web measurement and analytics company has bagged Certifica, which provides similar services. Certifica is based in Latin America and the purchase would help comScore have some influence in the region as well. We aren’t aware of the terms and finances of the deal. As for Certifica, the web analytic company has existed since 2000, providing stats on the Internet usage in the region.
Restaurant reservation site, OpenTable is making a big news today as it hit dining 1 million people via its mobile app. This means that the service has made a whopping $50 Million worth of revenue for its partners, given that each customer pays $50. The winning factor here is the massive directory of restaurants it has which total to 11,000 in numerous countries for numerous mobile devices which include the Android, iPhone and BlackBerry.
The much famed startup, 23andMe whose founder is Sergey Brin’s wife that exists with a purpose to make human DNA searchable is in some trouble. The startup after raising a healthy $3.9 Million from Google is planning a few layoffs. There has been no confirmation or clue as to how many of the employees will have to leave but there will be certain reduction in staff. But to be honest the startup has a bright future and perhaps will be one of the most widely used services in a decade or two.
While Yahoo must have gone through all sorts of trouble in the last one year and waved goodbye to the chief trouble makers, the redesign of the homepage has certainly helped. Yahoo’s SVP, Tapan Bhat stated that users are spending more time on the homepage ever since the redesign. The numbers appear pretty impressive given that the time spent has grown by 20% while the page views have gone up by 9%. This is one good news for Yahoo, which means that the content on the page is engaging enough for users to spend more time, something that also guarantees that a large chunk of users would often return to the site. To be honest I detested the old layout and the redesign comes as a breather, I mean the numbers tell a very positive story as well. I just hope things improve even further in the future and Yahoo is able to stay in the race as a respectable competitor.
Now this can be a mere coincidence but you can’t really put down the chances that Arnold Schwarzenegger had done this on purpose. But lets forget it being purposely done and think what is the probability that if you were to write such a letter and end up with 4W bomb? Very less and I guess it came out in the best possible manner, leaving everyone thinking what made him do that and yet no one can actually accuse him of literally mistakenly abusing the members. You can read further details on this here, while I try to create a similar letter.
