This Monday, MTV quietly deployed a Hot or Not competitor called NextorNot. The premise, as with Hot or Not, is simple: users flip through “profiles” of other users (consisting mainly of a portraits) and indicate whether they think the people in the profiles are attractive or not. In NextorNot’s case, you hit the “I Like” [...]
Skype has some more encouraging news following yesterday’s announcement that it has teamed up with MySpace to provide that social network’s users with free Skype calls. Early this morning, 10 million users were connected to the Skype global network at the same time. That’s a tenfold increase over their celebration on October 20, 2004 of [...]
San Francisco-based weather insurance site WeatherBill has taken $12.5 million in a round led by New Enterprise Associates and Index Ventures. Original investors Allen & Company, Atomico Investments (Skype founder Niklas Zennstrom), del.icio.us founder Joshua Schachter and Howard Morgan also participated.Barney Schauble, a partner at Nephila Capital and WeatherBill’s risk capacity partner, will join WeatherBill’s [...]
Social.FM (formerly Mercora) has released a new version of its social music service platform for Windows Mobile and announced a new distribution deal with Microsoft.The new Social.FM features improved application screens, sliding menus with transition effects, and an new white and green color scheme that is claimed to be “extremely fun-to-use for Windows Mobile customers.”Social.FM [...]
Good news for those looking for a free solution to unlock an iPhone with the latest firmware version 1.1.1: help has arrived. The latest version of AnySIM now unlocks iPhone’s. More at CrunchGear here.In the mean time though there are other practical uses for a bricked iPhone, as the video above demonstrates. Namaste to regular [...]
Micro television network provider Next New Networks has acquired BarelyPolitical.com, the site behind the Obama Girl video.This acquisition is Next New Networks’ first foray into politics, and BarelyPolitical will now be served along side Next New Network’s existing content including Channel Frederator. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.Whilst the Obama Girl video series (there [...]
We’ve come a long way since the record industry sued MP3.com in 2000. Listening to copies of your digital music online is quickly becoming commonplace and Norway’s Ezmo is another web application helping push the trend.Ezmo, like Anywhere.FM, is a clone of iTunes on the web that just came to the United States. Their Flash [...]
Let’s say you want to plan a party or some other get together. You have no shortage of options as to how you can get the word out to your guests. Your most reliable solution is probably just to spam your friends via email.But if you want to create a standing destination for your guests [...]
Spectrum Equity Investors has led a $300 million investment to acquire a majority interest in Provo Utah-based The Generations Network (the parent company of Ancestry.com, MyFamily.com and other sites) according to a source with knowledge of the deal.The Generations Network competes with a number of new Internet startups that we’ve recently covered. Its Ancestry.com site [...]
Peer-to-peer lending service CircleLending has been taken under the wings of Richard Branson’s Virgin empire and rebranded as Virgin Money USA.Virgin’s US investment firm recently bought a majority stake in the Waltham, Massachusetts company, which acts as an online middleman for friends and family who want to loan each other money. The exact amount of [...]
Starting in November, MySpace’s 110 million active users will be able to make free calls using Skype-enabled version of MySpace’s instant messaging client, MySpaceIM.This marks the first time that Skype has allowed its technology to be integrated into a 3rd-party application, thereby disassociating the Skype service from the Skype client. Skype has provided a developer [...]
Yahoo’s third quarter earnings came in this afternoon above Wall Street’s estimates ($0.11 per share versus the expected $0.08), but its net income of $151.3 million (on revenues of $1.8 billion) was still down five percent from last year. The biggest sign of life, though, is that its Panama ad-serving technology is finally starting [...]
Blurb, a self-publishing startup which specialises in illustrated books, is launching a new service to enable people to collaboratively create books. The new service is called Community Books and will initially launch in beta with photo sharing, which is Blurb’s most requested community-bookmaking feature. We last covered Blurb after their launch in May last year.Using [...]
Ever since HotorNot abandoned it’s experiment with going totally free last month, the traffic to its destination site, HotorNot.com, has predictably leveled off. Meanwhile, its application on Facebook is doing pretty well, already accounting for about a third of its daily logins, and 40 percent of it total unique visitors (although the two [...]
