Music search and discovery engine Deezer has raised €6.5 million ($9.6 million) in a second round of financing, bringing the total amount invested in the French upstart to approx. €12.2 million ($18 million). The additional capital was raised from from AGF Private Equity and CM-CIC Capital Privé, thus joining the historical shareholders who make up the DOTCORP Asset Management funds.Deezer is one of the most popular music services in Europe. Formerly known as BlogMusik, it ran into lots of legal trouble when it launched its free music streaming service a couple of years ago. However, unlike many other ventures of the kind the startup turned itself around, reached essential agreements with copyright associations, and ultimately relaunched as a 'legitimately' free music search engine back in August 2007.
This is one mobile application I think everyone should have installed. And be recommended by them to all of their friends and relatives to boot.Meet iMobile Care, a potential life-saver that you can carry around in your pocket.Launched at the beginning of this month, the app is primarily a reference guide that lets you obtain essential information about medical conditions and situations quickly and easily. The tool allows users to get a visual and textual explanation of how deliver aid and care during emergencies and events such as accidents, bites and stings, choking, injuries, poisoning, burns, and many other critical situations.But billed as a mere mobile first aid guide even by its own makers, it's actually much more than that.
We're now a little over a week into the extended roll-out of the preview build of Google Wave. This is an important time for the service because many people can now finally start using it as they eventually may — which is to say, with their friends and colleagues. Of course, the backlash is also already in full-swing, as expected. But I can't help but wonder if this backlash and the hype that it is a byproduct of, is blinding some to the larger picture. Google Wave is not just a service, it is perhaps the most complete example yet of a desire to shift the way we communicate once again.
When email was first created in 1965 it was used as a method to communicate between time-shared mainframe computers. Email has rapidly evolved since then, with the evolution of rich desktop clients, corporate email systems and webmail. Despite the evolution in the core messaging system, and despite the explosion in use of email, the default method for accessing and viewing communications has remained the same: chronological order.The first webmail imitated earlier mail clients by displaying messages in chronological order. The desktop computing paradigm was folders and files, sorted alphabetically. The web paradigm for accessing information has in most cases become chronological order, mostly because of the email and webmail legacy
The number one question you all asked after reading my last blog post about starting a business from scratch was "how do I find my co-founders?"Great question - let's start with a bit of self reflection:Close your eyes and visualize your group of closest friends. Now, think specifically about how tall (or short) they all are. Great, now ask yourself "are all of them roughly the same height?" I'll bet most of them are - you included. And therein lies the problem in finding co-founders for that startup you're dying to launch. It's most comfortable to hang out with people like ourselves, but those are exactly the folks you probably don't want to co-found a startup with. Seems a bit unintuitive, right? I’ll explain.
With the recent iPod Touch update Apple has positioned and marketed the device as a new type of mobile gaming platform. Games have always been some of the best selling applications in the AppStore for both the iPod Touch and the iPhone. A recent advertisement for the iPod Touch carries the slogan "The Funnest iPod Ever" and features a number of games. We decided to try out and review each of the games featured in the ad and rate the 'fun factor' ourselves.We previously reviewed the best iPhone Apps of this year. The following is our review of 12 new iPod Touch and iPhone games featured and highlighted in the recent Apple campaign:
During my time at TechCrunch I've seen thousands of startups and written about hundreds of them. I sure as hell don't know all the secrets to building a successful company, but there are a few things I've seen that seem like surefire ways to ever-so-slightly grease the road to success. Here's an easy one: make a video demo and prominently promote it somewhere where new visitors can find it. One that shows off the core function of your product without making people think they're watching an ad or a pitch. And answer, as thoroughly as possible in 2-3 minutes, what it is that you're bringing to the table.
There are a plethora of startups that are trying to harness and improve upon Twitter's real-time search functionality, including Collecta, One Riot, Scoopler and TwitterTroll. The simple fact is that there is considerable value for users in searching Tweets, and even the big guns like Microsoft and Google are beginning to wake up to this. Today, Searchtastic, which bills itself as "smart Twitter search," is launching its own Twitter search engine.
Asus, Acer, HTC or BenQ: Taiwan is well-known as a significant player in the global electronics industry, but it's safe to say the Taiwanese web landscape is still a black box for many of us. Taiwan ranks 10th in Asia in terms of Internet population, with around 15 million people currently online. Add to this an online ad market that grew by 14.9% to $208 million in 2009, and you have a fairly attractive Internet market overall.
Editor's note: Below is an open letter to our President from guest author Edo Segal, a concerned web geek who cares about the future of our democracy. It is followed by a proposal and a new website for anyone who thinks they know what #obamashould do (cynics please skip post).Mr President,On the night of your acceptance speech, just before you walked on stage, “you” sent out an email saying “i will be in touch soon”—but you disappeared and all we were left with was the strange feeling you get when your older brother ditches you for his cooler friends. Does it take you winning a Nobel prize to get another direct letter from you?Where’s the attention? The yes-we-can attitude, making us feel we can be good again? It seems that since you made it to the Oval Office you have been too busy at work, and our relationship has really suffered.
75 million phones running the Android operating system will be sold in 2012, says research firm Gartner, making it the second most popular mobile OS after Symbian.This makes sense, because the operating system is free (unlike Windows Mobile), and it gives mobile carriers and handset manufacturers who aren't Apple and RIM (the closed off guys) the ability to create a smartphone that someone may actually want to use. I've switched to Android now based largely on deep integration with Google Voice.
The big story today is about Microsoft subsidiary Danger losing all T-Mobile Sidekick customer data from their servers. Danger is the company noted for the T-Mobile Sidekick, the revolution in cloud mobile, and most memorably, almost everybody living in 90210 having to get new phone numbers because of Paris Hilton. Valued T-Mobile Sidekick customers received a notice today from the company updating them on the "data disruption" problem. The good news is that data is no longer being disrupted. The bad news is that there is no data left to be disrupted.
In one of those wonderful ironies of scheduling that make columnists weep with joy, Larry Dignan spent yesterday at a Yahoo! hack day in New York.This is the same Larry Dignan who is editor in chief of ZDNet, whichis the same ZDNet that yesterday published a blog post accusing Yahoo of passing the names and email addresses of thousands - sorry, hundreds of thousands - of bloggers to the Iranian authorities during the country's recent election.
It wasn't long ago that we heard about the imminent demise of one of the net's most infamous and venerable sites: Geocities. At the time, we could see the pendulum hanging from the rafters, but earlier this week it was set a-swinging and the site will die quietly and gallantly on October 26th. Of course, while the sites will no longer be accessible at Geocities itself, they will be preserved in our hearts — and on the Internet Archive, of course.
