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| about : newsroom — industry news |
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| | Rob Monster stirred the venture capital pot last summer when the entreprenuer-turned-angel investor launched Monster Venture Partners, saying at the time that venture capitalists deserved a "bad rap" for putting entrepreneurs in the "back corner." | | johncook@seattlepi.com (John Cook) - Thu, 28 Aug 2008 12:18:00 GMT |
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Things have been quiet over at Jaiku since its acquisition by Google last Fall. People worried that Google may have ruined Twitter's most formidable competitor by requiring the Finnish startup to labor away for months integrating its service into Google's technology stack instead of rolling out new features. All the while, new signups have been disabled and invitations limited, which has cut the service off from a healthy stream of new users.
But now we're seeing some signs of life. Jaiku has moved its software over to a Google data center and has given its existing users an unlimited number of invites to send their friends. | | - Thu, 28 Aug 2008 11:54:43 GMT |
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Android is getting its own App Store called the Android Market. It's open source and apparently free to use. | | - Thu, 28 Aug 2008 11:48:00 GMT |
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|  Why is it that both political campaigns feel the need to have their own social networks. Barack Obama has my.barackobama.com and John McCain has McCainSpace, which just relaunched with a new design from KickApps after failing massively on its own. The new McCainSpace design itself is functional enough, giving McCain supporters a central place to discuss election issues via blogs, forums, videos, and photos. But I'm not sure who the site is supposed to appeal to other than lonely Young Republicans who don't have any friends on Facebook.
The site is aimed at "Generation08," presumably the young'uns that the campaign is having a hard time reaching. The logo and default photo image remind me of something out of Close Encounters of the Third Kind (remember that scene with the alien light coming through the doorway?) And then there's the welcome video of McCain on the homepage (embedded below), saying "Greetings my friends." Greetings, gramps. | | - Thu, 28 Aug 2008 11:03:37 GMT |
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According to Silicon Alley Insider, YouTube is about to focus even more intently on leveraging its homepage for profit by selling large format ads that expand to fill the whole page. The ad unit, expected to come in the following weeks, will start at a price of about $200,000 per day with rates increasing in the Fall. | | - Thu, 28 Aug 2008 11:05:06 GMT |
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| | What career do you pursue after your mobile content company ends in tatters? | | johncook@seattlepi.com (John Cook) - Thu, 28 Aug 2008 10:56:00 GMT |
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| | Yesterday we announced that Jason Calacanis would be interviewing serial entrepreneur, Dallas Mavericks owner and billionaire Mark Cuban at TechCrunch50. The comments were mixed, and Cuban was clearly reading. And in one case, responding. When video blogger Loren Feldman wrote “Mark Cuban is not a tech visionary. He is a lucky bastard. Broadcast.com was a [...] | | - Thu, 28 Aug 2008 10:31:05 GMT |
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ELLEN M. BANNER / THE SEATTLE TIMES
Mike Calcagno, general manager with the Natural Language Group for Office at Microsoft, and members of his team identify and vet new words to add to the spell checkers that ship with Office in many different languages.
A friend who works in the sciences said it's difficult to trust the spell-checker in her field. "You think Bromodichloromethane or 4-Methyl-2-Pentanone are in there? Or whenever we use borehole the suggested correction is brothel..."
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YouTube has turned on the ability to add full closed captions to videos. This will not only allow videos to appeal more directly to foreign audiences, but will give YouTube excellent data for searching videos and targeting ads to them. After all, a complete set of subtitles is the same as a transcript of the video. And you can upload subtitles for as many languages as you want. It's excellent data. From the YouTube blog: | | - Thu, 28 Aug 2008 10:10:02 GMT |
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Mozilla, the non-profit organization behind the popular Firefox web browser, has extended its search deal with Google for another three years. In return for setting Google as the default search engine on Firefox, Google pays Mozilla a substantial sum - in 2006 the total amounted to around $57 million, or 85% of the company's total revenue. The deal was originally going to expire in 2006, but was later extended to 2008 and will now run through 2011.
The deal will ensure that the non-profit Mozilla foundation will be able to continue with the development of Firefox, its mail client Thunderbird, and a number of other applications. From Mozilla CEO John Lilly:
"We're very, very happy about our relationship with Google and this makes sure that Mozilla will be sustainable and thrive for quite a long time to come". | | - Thu, 28 Aug 2008 09:17:45 GMT |
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According to an AT&T source, net effect problems in the iPhone firmware are causing poor reception and calls dropped for iPhone 3G carriers. It's all your fault. | | - Thu, 28 Aug 2008 08:44:59 GMT |
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