It isn't often that a startup can raise nearly $12 million dollars and work in stealth for a year and a half without anyone noticing. But that's exactly what Tracked has done - and today they're launching a massive structured database for tracking people and businesses. Imagine LinkedIn meets Yahoo Finance, on lots of steroids.Tracked was founded in April 2008 by Michael Yavonditte, formerly the CEO of AOL-acquired Quigo. The service launches publicly today (right now, actually)."This is a new kind of business service," Yavonditte said in an interview yesterday. He has "begged, borrowed and stolen" (I don't think he meant that stolen part literally) data from other structured data sources and has mashed it together into a highly usable format. You can, for example, view public company financial statements, compensation data and insider trading for public company executives, or just overviews (and news items) for countless business people and other notable individuals. You can also create watchlists of people, companies or industries, and the service will create a customized news feed of news relevant to the items on your watchlist.If there is something in the business world you want to keep an eye one, Tracked will likely do that for you.
Yammer, the Twitter-like short messaging service for business users, has been experiencing a prolonged period of downtime today due to DNS issues. The service first went down over 12 hours ago, was alive for a short period tonight, and then became unresponsive again a few hours ago. The issue is also affecting sister company Geni, who share the same DNS servers.
Google will soon launch a music service, we've heard from multiple sources, and the company has spent the last several weeks securing content for the launch of the service from the major music labels. One source has referred to the new service as Google Audio.We're still gathering details, but our understanding is the service will be very different to the Google China music download service that they launched in 2008. That service, which is only available in China, allows users to search for music and download it for free. This new service will be available for at least U.S. users, our sources confirm, although it isn't clear if it's a download or streaming service, or both. Google already has a decent (if little used) music search engine that can be accessed by simply typing "music:" before a query (example). But songs are not available for streaming or download from those searches.We'll update as we get more details.
Earlier today Sun Microsystems announced that it would be cutting 3,000 members of its workforce, less than a year after the company announced plans to lay off up to 6,000 of its employees. Sun blamed the latest wave of layoffs on delays involved in Oracle's acquisition of the company, which was annouced last April but is currently being held up by European regulators.Sun says that it will be eliminating the jobs over the course of the next year in locations worldwide, and that the cuts have already begun. There are reports that there may be even more cuts once the acquisition is complete.
Seattle-based startup HelpHive lets consumers find rated and reviewed home service professionals, such as plumbers, landscapers, handymen and more. Exclusive to the greater Seattle area, HelpHive integrates with social networks, like Facebook, to help homeowners to find reviews from friends, colleagues and neighbors. Today, the site is launching a monetization strategy called "Referral Pro" Plans which charges businesses in exchange for promotion and advertising. Businesses pay $99 per year to receive increased promotion on HelpHive.com with increased promotion in search for keywords related to the service businesses provide, on the home page, on their specific service page (e.g. for an Electrician, on the Electricians page etc.) and on unclaimed business pages in their service category (i.e. a business in the paid plan would appear on pages of other unclaimed businesses that provide the same service). Businesses who are participating in this program are also required to pay 5 percent of any total transactions for booked jobs to HelpHive (if the job was through HelpHive's platform).
Loopt, the New Enterprise Associates and Sequoia-backed mobile social network, has acquired a relative newcomer to the scene - Y Combinator startup GraffitiGEO. Multiple sources have confirmed the acquisition, although neither company is commenting.GraffitiGEO, which launched just a couple of months ago, combines mobile social networking with reviews and games. It's somewhat similar to the surging foursquare, which has stolen some of the oxygen from the first generation mobile social networks like Loopt.GraffitiGEO is also preparing to launch an augmented reality applicationthat we previewed in August and that we suspect will launch shortly. Both GraffitiGEO apps fill holes in Loopt's product lineup, so the acquisition makes a lot of sense. Here's the video of the application that we included in that post:
We've seen plenty of sites emerge over the last few years that are built around helping users share media: Facebook is the largest photo sharing site on the planet, but there's also media-centric sites like Flickr that have devoted followings. rrripple is the latest to joint the fray, and it's doing it with a unique UI that's optomized for both mouse/keyboard and touchscreen interaction. The company was part of this year's TechCrunch50 demopit, where it launched its public beta.The site has a slick and fairly unique design: everything is organized on a timeline, with an album for each day represented as a vertical column running up the screen. Each column is filled with thumbnails representing the photos taken on that day, which makes it easy to tell at a glance which album you want to jump to. Once you've chosen an album, you can hone in on the type of media you'd like to look at from that day, be it photos, videos, notes, links, or files.
For weeks - months even - analysts have been telling Apple to make a netbook for the masses, a $299 junker designed for those who surf the web on the couch, their Cheeto-stained hands scrabbling for the TiVo remote while they incessantly refresh Reddit and hope against hope that their Craigslist Missed Connection emails them back. The Air, they said, was too expensive, designed for the frou-frou quiche-eaters of Silicon (V)alley while the MacBook Pros were too overpowered for the likes of Flyover Sally and her sad-eyed brood of younglings. They needed to sell something to the masses, something solid, American, and corn-fed. Well, now Sally, the quiche-eaters, and the Cheeto dude - and the rest of us - have the new MacBook. It offers a bit less power and peformance than the Pro line, a little more of the styling of the Air line, and sells right at $999, a magic marketing number that is neither North of $1000 (before taxes) and South of corporate financial suicide.
RIM is good at plenty of stuff: As any sore-thumbed business-type could tell you, they've got the whole email thing down. They can pump out software updates for a bunch of handsets at an outright impressive pace. With the BlackBerry Storm2, they've shown people that they can build the touchscreen device everyone thought they were building the first time around. Even with all these talents, one thing still drags them down, tarnishing an otherwise exceptional brand: their browser.After RIM snatched up the development company behind a WebKit-based browser back in August, it was pretty easy to deduce where things were going: there would be a new browser, and it'd be fueled by WebKit. For everyone out there not comfortable with deduction, however, we've now got good ol' fashion undeniable proof.
Palaran, a stealth-mode advertising startup based in Palo Alto, has raised $1 million Series A from True Ventures, we've learned. True Venture's Jon Callaghan has taken a board seat along with Om Malik as a board observer. Palaran’s undisclosed round of angel funding came from Esther Dyson, Delicious founder Joshua Schachter and Vish Makhijani, among others.Palaran was founded in July and has been in stealth mode until now, but we've learned that the startup has something to do with web based advertising.
Over the weekend Verizon unleashed its marketing campaign for its upcoming Motorola Droid smartphone, pointing out some of the iPhone's biggest flaws on prime time television as well as on the website DroidDoes.com. The phone, which will be the first to run Android 2.0 and is sporting some heavy duty specs, may be a viable challenger to Apple's iPhone dominance. Thing is, the Droid still isn't officially announced yet, and we still don't have a release date.But we do have some hints: DroidDoes.com features a mysterious countdown timer that consists of a bunch of nonsensical symbols swirling by. Through some trickery (namely changing your computer clock or looking at the site's config.xml file), it's pretty easy to see what it's counting down to. When the site launched on Saturday the countdown was going to October 30, 12:00 AM CST. Sometime today, that changed: the clock is now counting down to October 28, at 12:00 AM CST. Or 48 hours earlier than it used to be.
REvolution Computing, the "RedHat" for the open source “R” statistical computing language, has received $9 million in Series B funding from North Bridge Venture Partners and Intel Capital. The company also announced that founder and former chairman of SPSS, Norman Nie, has been named CEO. Founded in 2007, REvolution Computing sells products, including REvolution R and REvolution R Enterprise, that allow statisticians, scientists and others to create predictive models and and make sense of large sets of mission-critical data easily and quickly. The "R" statistical language has been growing growing in popularity as support increases in the open-source and academic communities.
Today at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, Twitter co-founder and CEO Evan Williams took the stage for a discussion with Federated Media's John Battelle.It was a lengthy discussion covering a lot of interesting topics. If you're interested in Twitter, you'll probably want to read the full Q&A below (and we'll post a video if we get it).
Today at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, Zynga CEO Mark Pincus took the stage to talk about social gaming.Pincus started out praising Facebook for opening the platform in 2007, which had led to the rise of companies like his. And they've come a long way. Zynga's first game in July 2007 was a social poker game on Facebook, and just yesterday the company hit 50 million daily active users across its properties.
