Kevin Conroy, the EVP of Products and Marketing at AOL is leaving the troubled company to become President of Interactive Media at Univision. Kevin Conroy used to manage services like Xdrive, AOL Pictures, Bluestring and MyMobile, all of which have been shut down. Currently Conroy was managing AOL Mail, MYAOL, the AOL client, Userplane and Truveo – but decided that it wasnt much fun at AOL after all.
According to CEO Randy Falco’s official memo:
SpotMixer, an online video ad creator – owned by One True Media, has raised $9 million in second round of funding led by DAG Ventures and NTT Finance, with participation from existing backer Kleiner Perkins. SpotMixer has also announced that it has been appointed as the first official authorized reseller of Google’s Adsense service for videos. The startup is trying to pitch itself as a low cost online video ad option for small companies amidst the troubling economic times.
RatePoint, a Needham, Mass., startup that lets web sites collect feedback from users about their offerings, has raised $10 million in second round of funding led by Castile Ventures with participation from existing backers 406 Ventures and Prism VentureWorks. RatePoint’s widgets could be embedded into websites – on the product pages for example to gather feedback from the users in the form of comments and ratings. The site owners have the flexibility to either display the ratings and comments publicly or use them for internal data aggregation purposes.
Forbes has laid off 19 workers as it merged the online and magazine operations in a bid to become competitive and lean again to cope with the worsening economy. The move makes a lot of sense, but nevertheless would be hard for the ones who lost their jobs today.
According to official statement:
Seagate has doubled the storage capacity per platter to 500 GB with the release of Barracuda 7200.12. This makes Barracuda 7200.12 industry’s highest areal density hard drive that boosts a SATA interface, a data rate of 160 MB/sec. The Hard Disk is available in 500GB, 750 GB, and 1 TB versions, but the price tags haven’t been disclosed as yet.
Salesforce, one of the pioneers of Cloud Computing and Software as a Service metaphor was completely down for around 40 minutes yesterday. Although this is the first major blackout experienced Salesforce, the amount of downtime in a single day corresponds to almost half a decade when it comes to its 99.99% uptime guarantee.
2009 will definitely see a major shift in the blogging landscape with advertising likely to dry up, many blogs would either go down and under or will get acquired by some viable media outlet. Basic Thinking a popular German blog with more than 25,000 RSS Subscribers is now put up on auction at eBay by founder Robert Basic. Basic wont be selling other blogs in his network, but is looking for something in between 10,000 – 100,000 Euros for all assets related to Basic Thinking.
The sale of Fujitsu’s hard disk division to Western Digital, which seemed almost imminent sometime back, has now gone haywire. Fujitsu’s President Kuniaki Nozoe, has now publicly stated there is currently zero chance of the deal getting hammered.
SundaySky, an Israeli based startup that creates digital video generation solutions, has raised $8 million in first round of venture funding led by Carmel Ventures and Globespan Capital Partners. SundaySky enables websites to automatically convert their content into dynamic, continuously updating, HD videos.
SundaySky’s CEO, Mr. Shmulik Weller, said:
