Archive for the ‘News’ Category
Last week I did a post about how the Internet was getting all decked out in preparation for Black Friday. Well this morning when I checked my e-mail I had a newsletter from Amazon Affiliates who I occasionally use on my blog. They were pretty much telling me that if I wanted to make money now was the time to do it.
They have prepare special banners such as the one to the left and set up a special Black Friday section. What’s more (I’m sure this will please many bloggers reading this) affiliates earn 15% for every sale they refer on Black Friday – not bad.
Their entire new range of banners and widgets is available to view here.
Online sales for the week of Black Friday are set to rise into the millions as big sites such as EBay and Amazon prepare.
Is it really worth standing in line and charging around malls when you could do it all at home?
So much has happened in the last few months with regards to Skype. eBay which bought Skype for $2.6 million back in 2005 has finally settled its litigation with Skype’s founders, and now the sale and restructure has been finalised.
The result: Skype now owns all of its technology, the founders received 14% of Skype and two seats on the Board of Directors, eBay keeps 30% of Skype, and the rest is owned by outside investors.
1. eBay now owns 30% of Skype, outside investors (including Silver Lake, Andreessen Horowitz, and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board) own 70%.
2. 14% or so is owned by Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, the founders of Skype who have been added to the investor pool.
3. The Skype deal values the company at $2.75 billion, which is a little higher than the price eBay paid for Skype in 2005.
4. Joltid Limited is an investor in Skype. Joltid is owned by the Skype founders and was a major part of the legal dispute between eBay and the founders. The company held a key P2P technology that Skype now owns as part of this deal.
Thats the full recap on the new situation for Skype. Hopefully now Skype can move forward and start more innovations with their product.
It has now been confirmed that Myspace has closed on its acquisition of Imeem, the music streaming service. It is paying a fire sale price of $1 million, sources familiar with the situation tell me, and could pay up to $7 million to $9 million in earnouts for key employees, who will likely include CEO Dalton Caldwell.
The deal basically values Imeem at around $8 million, even though Sequoia and Warner Music have already pumped $25 million into the venture.
I dont understand why Myspace thought it was a good idea to purchases Imeem! Was it just about the users who are still active on Imeem, cause it definitely wasnt about the technology or the earnings potential.
Some of you may remember that last week we posted a screenshot which was supposedly from the PS3 website but had been leaked unintentionally. It depicted a Facebook logo on the PS3 Home screen indicating that Facebook was coming to the popular gaming console. Now, we can confirm that story.
In an update for the PS3 is out and ready for download. Along with outer features, Facebook is included. Here is what Sony said in an official press release:
Showcase Trophies: Instantly share trophies you earn in PS3 games in your Facebook stream. Simply sync your PS3 system and easily show off your accomplishments to friends and family.
PlayStation Store Purchase Log Publishing: Let friends and family on Facebook instantly know which PlayStation 3 games you’ve purchased. The PlayStation Store, available to PS3 and PSP® (PlayStation®Portable) system owners through PlayStation Network, features over 200 downloadable games, many of which are exclusive to PS3 or PSP system owners, in addition to over 4,000 pieces of add-on game content.
Game Event: With a few quick clicks of the controller sharing select game events, progress and statistics is now easier than ever with the Facebook integration.
So what are you waiting for? Go get the update!
Back in 2006 before the average Joe on the street had a smart phone – we all used our cell phones to check our e-mails, Flickr, news, weather and other such services. The main port of call for this was Yahoo Go – a mobile client released by Yahoo!
However, Yahoo! have just announced that Go is to suffer the same fate as GeoCities did last month – it’ll be leaving us. Come January 12th next year, when you turn on Yahoo! Go on your mobile you’ll get an error message.
Undoubtedly this is because of the competition from more powerful apps and platforms such as those on the iPhone.
However I think this might be slightly pre-mature because the app is still being sold on phones as you read this. Perhaps Yahoo! are trying to push us into the smart phone market?
Tweeting is now done mostly by third-party apps on mobile devices and on PCs It’s now becoming a rarity to tweet via the actual webpage. It’s becoming even more of a rarity to tweet via SMS as apps become more available even for the most basic of Java enabled mobile phones.
However, these apps for basic mobile phones don’t always offer the chance to tweet photos which is something we tweeters do quite a bit. So for the first time on Twitter ever, the ability to tweet via MMS is coming to the UK.
The service will allow those on the Orange network to send a snap to 86444 and have it appear on their Twitter timeline. It’s only available to Orange customers as the popular mobile network owns a photo sharing website called Snapshot which will host the pictures and tweet out a link.
The only alternative to this (and it’s what I do when I’m out and about) is to e-mail a picture from your mobile phone which can be done easily once you set up your e-mail right and have an account on a service such as twitpic.com.
Some of the most popular Twitter accounts (with followers well into the millions) come from well-known faces such as Ashton Kutcher and Stephen Fry. And of course, the president of the United States Barak Obama. He has over 2.6 million followers who will be disappointed to learn it’s not him behind the Twitter account.
I think everyone knew that he didn’t tweet all of the time but he actually said that he has ‘never’ used Twitter before!
It happened during a meeting with Chinese youth when somebody put a question to him about the freedom of the internet and information in China through networks such as Twitter. He then replied:
“I have never used Twitter but I’m an advocate of technology and not restricting internet access.”
To be honest, I wouldn’t be surprised if he got into a bit of trouble with his publicists who would have preferred to have people think he tweets. Oh well, half the celebrity Twitter accounts are fake anyway – at least this one is actually coming from somebody in the White House.
Its been reported that Evernote the popular note taking service has raised another $10 million in Series B funding. This series B funding comes after already raising $6 million.
Already Evernote has a solid business model with a great number of premium subscribers who already pay for the service. Thus, Evernote has nearly two million users, some paying in the premium model, so why the new funding? Is Evernote looking to purchase any other startups or push their service into default applications on mobile phones?
Andrew Sinkov, VP of Marketing, tells us, “All of that money is going into the product. That’s always been Evernote’s approach. Our product is our marketing, so we’re using the funds to make Evernote better, more functional, and more accessible to new users. We’re also adding new platforms, new language support, and lots of other good stuff.”
Today, reports have surfaced saying that Twitters visitor numbers are decreasing for the first time ever. Apparently, visitor numbers fell by 8% in October. However, in this writer’s opinion Twitter isn’t floundering. These numbers merely represent the differences between Twitter and the rest of the web.
It’s interesting that these numbers are recorded for October. October is a month where people are settling back into school and college, winter’s coming in and the summer social bubble on the Internet has truly popped as people head back tot their normal routine after holidays, time off school and plenty of sunshine and tweet-worthy activities.
I think people are simple more busy and are tweeting from their portable devices instead which easily make up half of Twitter tweets. Instead of taking out the laptop while relaxing in the sun they’re cramming themselves into the Subway and letting everyone know about it from their phones.
Twitter are also rolling out new features such as Lists and now their GeoLocation feature which we discussed here the other day. Suggestions that Twitter is floundering are just hype. Until Twitter’s influence and micro-culture starts to evaporate – don’t believe any of these kind of statements.
Ah Black Friday – it makes headlines every year. Shopping malls all over the US are packed with people grabbing what they can, doing a 100m dash to the cash register while hurdling over three piles of fighting shoppers all while the kids follow behind, trying desperately to keep up. Was is two or three years ago that a security guard was killed when the shop’s doors burst in on top of him? Crazy…
And the Internet is already getting ready for its own Black Friday. Advertisements, sales and offers are creeping in all over the place. Dell for one have knocked off a whopping $334 dollars from this laptop:
And eBay is swelling with week long auctions for Christmas gifts such as iPhones, watches, iPods, laptops and the likes. So what other bargains have we found?
Well how about a Sonia Bravia 40” TV for just shy of $1,000. Or a 120Gb Zune for only $200. You can also get a FujiFilm FinePix A170 with 10.2 megapixels for less than $60.
Black Friday is already staring to climb up the Twitter Trends chart and I’m sure that by Wednesday it’ll be sitting there high and mighty as we all tweet about what we’re going to buy, what our plan is to outsmart the other shoppers (which will undoubtedly fail) and how much money we’ll save. All I can say is that I’ll be doing the bulk of my shopping online. It beats standing around in the freezing cold all night waiting for a shop to open.
If you’re looking for more money off when you go shopping next Friday (or indeed do it online), we suggest you check out Offers.com and Ask Deals for coupons and information on where items are the cheapest.
For the first ever time Flickr has teamed up with a photo printing service for its users to use. Snapfish (owned by HP) will be Flickr’s preferred photo printing service and will be integrated with Twitter to make it easier for the users to export their pictures – and thus make it the preferred service of the users.
At the minute, users have to upload their pictures to an independent printer of their choice. However, because they’ll be able to export whole albums, photo streams etc… at the click of a mouse I can certainly see this being a promising endeavour for SnapFish. However, they will have to give some of their profits back to Flickr obviously – but because they’re available in 22 countries they’ll definitely be turning a profit this year.
Yahoo!, who own Flickr, have come under fire in recent times due to their management of the brand and the controversial decision to include video on the photography site (this has led to several online groups against videos on Flickr being founded). However, they still have over 4 billion photographs on the site and it’s growing by 100 million each month, so SnapFish won’t be complaining.
PC users have been able to use the Google Chrome browser for some time now, however for everyone using Macs they have been waiting patiently for their own non-developer version. Chrome day for the Mac is coming very soon.
CNET is reporting that recent discussion in a Chrome mailing list points to an early December launch. We could be just weeks away from a beta version of Chrome for Mac.
The Google group update in question is light on details, but by requesting that developers update to support Browser Actions, it also suggests that a December launch date for a Mac version is fast approaching.
Google Chrome’s product manager, Nick Baum, writes:
“The extensions team has been working hard to get BrowserActions ready, and
they’re already working great on Windows and Linux. We’ve noticed that many
of you have updated your extensions to take advantage of the new UI. We’d
like to encourage the rest of you to do so as well!
You can find the latest docs here:
http://code.google.com/chrome/extensions/browserAction.html
Why make the switch now? The earlier you switch, the more time you will have
to polish your experience for our Beta launch in early December. We realize
this means dropping Mac support for a couple of weeks, but we already have
people working on that. If you prioritize the Windows and Linux versions,
we’ll bring you cross-platform parity as soon as we can!”
The post provides an interesting clue to the future of Google Chrome for Mac. We can only hope the early December beta launch date is accurate.
Last week I did a post about how the Internet was getting all decked out in preparation for Black Friday. Well this morning when I checked my e-mail I had a newsletter from Amazon Affiliates who I occasionally use on my blog. They were pretty much telling me that if I wanted to make money now was the time to do it.
