Netpulse that provides users with access to HDTv and on demand videos and music as raised a healthy $3.1 Million in Series A round. The funding was led by Javelin Venture Partners along with participation from DFJ Frontier. These funds will be used to improve its platform that is integrated with fitness equipments, giving users an interactive way to entertain themselves while they perform fitness exercises.
Flash games, loads of them and easy to play, perhaps the best way to kill time and you have enough places to play those games. Scumlabs is another startup or should I say a portal for flash based games. The site offers a plethora of games ranging from the historical Super Mario to Pacman so if you are one of those die hard gamer who isn’t into the close to life games on PS3 or Xbox 360 then Scumlabs is where you need to be hitting the keys at.
Everyone loves sending text messages, be it for sharing a funny joke or simply asking how your friends are. I guess the best part is the ease with which one can communicate without being bounded by the rules of grammar and this gets even better if you can text in your native language. QuillPad is a new application coming from India that enables you to send text messages in Hindi. simply hit the English letters and the screen shows you the written message in Devanagari script. I bet the app is going to do great given that India alone has more than 400 Million mobile subscribers and the number continues to grow exponentially plus a large percentage of these users would love to send messages in the native language, which is definitely the winning point of this application.
I came across this interesting news which states a survey that firms in the UK continue to take punches from employee’s online activity. These punches have cost these firms an estimated $2.25 Billion a year, thanks to every employee spending an average 40 minutes a week on social networks like Twitter and Facebook. Now to be honest this is just another reason to justify the losses and these social networks have actually given the employees a way to break away from work and actually help them being more productive. I mean employees weren’t much productive either when they spent time smoking away a few minutes every now and then or having lengthened conversations while they just munched some food. At least with this employees can actually enjoy their time at work place by communicating with an old friend somewhere far and actually have a better focus at work, spending a few minutes online.
I strongly believe in employees having these facilities. What do you all think? I also think that if employers are really worried about this, they should devise methods that can utilize the employee time spent online to the firms’ benefit. Marketing is just one aspect they shift the social scene into.
When it comes to social networks and media there is a high probability that almost everyone uses them for promotion for one thing or the other. I guess this is exactly what CalTweet creators had thought before they created it. The startup saves users time when it comes to marketing and promoting online. It lets you share and promote their items on Twitter and Facebook as well as on numerous other social networks. What I liked best is that it lets you make use of various functions which include the retweeting four times a day and automatically changes the statements to make sure that your followers aren’t fed up seeing the same promotional tweets coming up all the time. The startup also plans to release its application for Facebook which would automatically update or share any event you put on Facebook to your Twitter page. Sounds pretty sleek and it might just become an independent promotional site instead of relying heavily on Twitter.
Salesforce is making quite some moves presently, ever expanding with its integration with the Box.net, Twitter, etc. Presently the SaaS provider has partnered with Adobe. The integration will have Force.com, its platform for creating apps to offer Adobe Flash Builder. This would enable developers as well as IT professionals to create applications using Force.com’s platform which will be much improved with the Adobe Flash Builder. This would add a lot of value to their businesses with the ease of creating custom applications that suit their needs.
When it comes to a live performance, U2 has created its niche during the three decades it has been in existence. Things have changed and the new medium for live telecast is the Web. And here we have U2 streaming their concert at Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California at YouTube. Meaning that Live in one country will mean the event will be aired to 16 countries. The live streaming will also feature a widget from Twitter that will show tweets that have the #U2webcast tag. Plus even if you do miss the live event out, you will still be able to see the recorded event at YouTube.
It keeps getting better, from making Retweeting from the browser easier to following and un-following people and earlier Twitter made its search results a little less messy. It stopped including deleted tweets in the results which was quite irritating to have them there. With this, the instant you delete a tweet, Twitter will remove it from the search index as well, meaning that they will not even be included in any of the third party apps as well. But I just wonder if all the tweets from every where are deleted. I mean the volume of retweets, etc being indexed in bulk, I won’t be surprised if I end up seeing my deleted tweet in search results.
If you are one of those who would do anything to get hooked to the latest gossip then try flashing some junk. I am talking about JunkFlash, the new browser add on that does the best thing one can do; recognize a celebrity and tell the latest news to their name. The plugin pulls in this news from more than 50 celebrity news site which include TMZ, Gawker and People to name a few. This is pretty good, given that it saves time for gossip lovers by eliminating the need to search for news by bringing them automatically to them, the same instant. I bet this will do quite good as it saves you time reading gossips doing that things that would otherwise take an entire day.
If you think sending text messaged via your cell phone costs a lot and you desperately need a cheaper way to send group texts then try SendGM. The startup lets you send messages via an email client or browser and is very effective where a group of people often interacts. It also lets you do a bunch of other things as well which include importing contacts or inviting members and adding them to existing groups. The best part is perhaps the recipient acknowledgement option which lets you know who has received the email or not plus letting you create instant polls so that you can take quick decisions with your friends over a plan. Well sounds worth the use, given that it isn’t charging you anything for it.
It was only a matter of time before it had to happen, or at least begin happening. Australia’s Griffith University thinks its quite important to have Twitter as part of its curriculum for journalism. We have seen the importance of Twitter when it comes to breaking news, we saw it with the Earthquakes and the Elections, when everything else couldn’t provide us with information. This isn’t just Twitter, there has been a growing emphasis on the need for prospective employees to be well versed with Social Media, which shows that it is no more just about connecting with people but also about sharing information and news globally. I am happy to read this, primarily because i emphasis a lot on making more out of Twitter than just tweeting.
I am not sure how the audience takes this but if you have some sort of motion sensor technology in your iPhone to feel jerks and shakes and some clever developer can put it to use in an app it sounds great. Well someone has actually done so to let you know how good you are in bed loving. Available at the App Store for $1.99, Love Vibes lets you rate how good you really with your partner by ranking you between 1 and 10. It does this by analyzing the vibrations in your bed and then compared the result to the countless couples that it have been surveyed so far. Sounds quite.. God knows what, but I don’t think there’s any way you can actually mark your sex motions (sorry I don’t have any better word). I am not sure who is buying this, but who ever will, really wants to make sure what his rank is on bed.
After putting former Yahoo CEO and founder, Jerry Yang, investor Carl Icahn thinks his era of destruction Yahoo reformation is done. The investor thinks its high time he left Yahoo and focused more on other companies where he has made investments in. He started to feature in news regularly last year when Yang had some major issues with the Microsoft deal before Microsoft pulled the wires off it. Those were some really tough times for Yahoo but I guess with Bartz as its CEO and how she has been carrying along with Yahoo Icahn must have realized that his battles would bear no fruits plus the kind of person he is, who just wants to make huge profits on stocks and then walk away, Yahoo just doesn’t provide him with the opportunity anymore. I hope things head on better with Yahoo, though it has lost one of its major investors, but for peace on board, it’s worth it.
Now this isn’t something new, the idea of sharing files on the Web with a countless services out there (MySites, Box.net, etc). But things change a bit and users demand a bit more when sharing is to bee done with many friends. Sayabit is a startup that helps you with exactly that. It simply turns your files to be shared into short URLs so that they can be shared much easily. What it does is simply let you upload a file and generate a short URL. This can be passed around to your friends, connections and the URL takes them to a page where the file is hosted. But doesn’t that make your document or file available to all? Well if it’s something you really need to keep within your circle you can assign a password to it, letting you share it with people who you really want to share it with.
Wow, its not just the execs that are cut off from the MySpace branches, but so are the products. CEO Owen Van Natta made sure he was vocal about it as he spilled the beans on ripping off major products. Those most probably include Horoscopes, Calendars, Polls and Books. I guess this is all about shrinking the focus of MySpace and pulling it closer to more of an Entertainment social network. It appears that the decision or the plan is the brainchild of Jason Hirschhorn.
There is no denying that Microsoft has that thing for Twitter, we saw it with Bing and today it utilized the micromessaging service to provide support for Windows 7 users by creating @MicrosoftHelps. However I was just a bit surprised reading that it has been around for almost a week and still hasn’t got the penetration it should have. Well we can put that aside and think that its latest OS is only out in the market and there is a lot it has to do, but the idea to setup a customer support at Twitter is a very good idea. It will provide Twitter users the chance to pitch questions on issues they have with the OS, though it is only in English for the time being. I quite like the idea, sorry for being repetitive, the only reason is I wasn’t expecting Microsoft to be so open towards to Twitter to actually provide customer support.
DotBlu, the betting site that let users place fake bets on various subjects ranging from sports to technology has lost the battle to stay online. The site had quite renowned backers including the likes of Kevin Hartz, Jawed Karim, Keith Rabois but it appears that wasn’t enough to keep it going and all it reads now is just a short note informing members about its closure. I guess everyone is used to it; the idea of certain startups just failing to lift off.
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Online Storage and sharing service Box.net has integrated itself with Salesforce.com. With this integration, Salesforce will add the Box.net application to user accounts enabling them to quickly access the files they have put online at the service. Businesses that signup for the new integration, will be facilitated with unlimited storage, which is a huge plus given that its existing users don’t have. Other than this, it would give users, primarily businesses a better and more trusted place to share data that is accessible from any where.
HR tech company, RiseSmart has bagged another healthy sum in its Series A round which is worth $4.6 Million. The funding came from the major VCs in Silicon Valley, Storm Ventures and Norwest venture Partners. The firm uses Web technology that is supported by a team of HR professionals that provide cost effective and tech savvy alternates to existing services. The site had also raised a round in December last year too.
I am not sure if it is going to become the most widely used communication tool but Skype continues to grow, faster. The registered users grew by more than 41% to reach a mammoth 521 million users and scored a healthy third quarter while eBay still tries to let go of it. The earnings have gone up to $185 Million which is quite, well impressive and that is not it, it has shown a the same exponential growth in everything, the free Skype to Skype minutes have grown by 74% to a staggering 27 billion free minutes. I am just wondering if this does continue the way it is, Skype may very well cross the $1 Billion yearly revenue in the next two years.
