Tweetmeme takes off, reaches 50 million button impressions a day
British social media company Fav.or.it wants to own retweets, the short messages on Twitter that are copied from other users. The company says its Tweetmeme button (below) is shown more than 50 million times a day across the web and is now supported in RSS feeds and e-mail.
Data on retweets, which are a way to share links and ideas on Twitter, is valuable because it’s a barometer for popular content on the microblogging service … Continue Reading
Maybe we shouldn't be surprised when Amazon sells us out
Updated with comment from Amazon
Amazon created a stir today when, at the request of the publisher, it deleted copies of George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm off its Kindle eBook reader. That’s right, it didn’t just remove those eBooks from its store, it deleted them off the Kindles of people who had purchased copies of the book (the price of the book was credited to their account). Naturally, Kindle owners are a bit miffed … Continue Reading
AOL Ventures gets new leader to clean, rebuild house
Former Googler Tim Armstrong is making more moves to redefine AOL, the struggling and soon-to-be spun off former Time Warner subsidiary that he is now chief executive of. He just named an old business partner, Jon Brod, to run the company’s venture unit, according to BoomTown.
The significance is that Brod will be charged with deciding what new startups and initiatives the company should be investing in or buying — he’ll also be responsible for … Continue Reading
Thanks for coming to MobileBeat2009!
Thanks to all of you who made it to MobileBeat2009 yesterday!
We had a wide-ranging discussion of the biggest mobile trends of the day. One conclusion from all of the excitement: the U.S. is leapfrogging Europe.
That’s not a conclusion made by us. It came from several Europeans (see story). Mark Curtis, of Flirtomatic, was another attendee from Europe who told me last night he was somewhat ashamed that the enthusiasm exhibited here yesterday would … Continue Reading
MobileBeat: Making mobile software social
Mobile software on compelling new devices like the iPhone is creating huge new industries, but the world is a year or two away — at least — from seeing the results really manifest themselves.
Or that was the unsurprising consensus among the panelists I moderated yesterday at our MobileBeat 2009 conference (this is one of our last posts about the conference, so bear with me). The panelists included Facebook mobile head Henri Moissinac, payment service … Continue Reading
Nokia sells off Symbian professional services to Accenture
When Nokia purchased Symbian a year ago, the supersize phone maker’s explicit plan was to open up Symbian’s mobile platform as a partly open-source suite of software so that application developers would feel comfortable developing for it and contributing their improvements to Symbian’s OS.
On Thursday, at our MobileBeat 2009 conference, Symbian announced the launch of Horizon, an application publishing platform for the Symbian OS.
Today, Nokia announced the sale of its Symbian professional services … Continue Reading
Twittergate: "Diddy values his contribution higher than we do"
In the latest round of poring over the leaked Twitter documents, the LA Weekly singles out notes from a day on which Twitter management met with P. Diddy, Oprah Winfrey and Google search engine chief Marissa Mayer.
Diddy clearly made the wrong impression on the Twitterers, who euphemistically labeled him “not so strategic.”
But Diddy’s not the only one who perhaps values his contribution too much. LA Weekly staffers, who spend far more time than … Continue Reading
Worklight 3.1 publishes business widgets on Facebook, iPhone, and everywhere else
There are a lot of companies trying to offer enterprise versions of popular consumer products — for example, “Twitter for business” startup Yammer, not to mention the countless “social networking for business” products. But a New York company called WorkLight is taking a different approach: instead of building a business product that’s like Facebook, it’s bringing business tools onto Facebook itself. And with the release of version 3.1 of its application platform, it’s starting to … Continue Reading
Ubisoft to launch social game portal and first Facebook game
The lure of social media platforms is drawing the biggest video game companies. The latest to dive into social gaming is the French console game publisher Ubisoft, which announced its first game for Facebook today as well as a Facebook game portal to access its Facebook games.
The first game is a viral trivia title dubbed TickTock, which you play with your real friends on Facebook. In the game, you send bombs back and forth … Continue Reading
Verizon agrees to limit exclusive handset deals
A few weeks ago, the FCC began to examine whether exclusive handset deals between cellphone makers and wireless carriers was bad for consumer choice. This was the latest follow-up to a request made last year by a group of two dozen smaller wireless carriers, each with under 500,000 customers.
But Verizon has beaten the FCC to the punch. The company announced that it will limit its exclusive handset deals to six months, at least for … Continue Reading
MobileBeat: USA will leapfrog Europe
We came away from yesterday’s MobileBeat 2009 conference with a surprise lesson: Europe’s mobile industry has led the world since its birth, but the balance of power is changing. Many attendees remarked on it: MobileBeat is an event the Valley couldn’t have pulled off a couple of years ago, but now it rivals what you’d expect from a European conference. We’re not bragging; it’s simply the case that the iPhone has given Americans a new … Continue Reading
Staying out of the weeds
Microsoft will never be mistaken for a small company – and it left its entrepreneurial roots behind long ago, but there are still important lessons new business owners can take from the company.
With so many divisions fighting for R&D dollars, CEO Steve Ballmer says he often feels like a “mini venture capitalist,” having to choose between the ideas he thinks will work and those that won’t. In this segment, taken from a Entrepreneurial Thought … Continue Reading
MobileBeat: Listen to panels on mobile gatekeepers and startup competition part 2
Stitcher has delivered more audio recordings of Thursday’s MobileBeat conference. The first link is for the panel entitled What Will the Gatekeepers Do Now? The AppStore and Beyond (pictured above), moderated by Matthaus Krzykowski. And the other is the MobileBeat 2009 Startup Competition — Apps event. (pictured below)
MobileBeat: Four ways to make money off mobile apps
With more than 65,000 apps available in Apple’s iPhone app store, developers are experimenting with a variety of ways to earn money — from interstitial ads to relying on initial payments of $1 – $2 for downloads. The problem with that approach is that it’s difficult to be a breakout hit, and a developer needs real scale unless they are a highly specialized medical or financial application, said Mark Donovan, a senior vice president of … Continue Reading
Can Facebook help apps get iPhone distribution?
One of the biggest problems for iPhone apps is finding users — the main way growth happens now is, paradoxically, by climbing the charts of the iTunes app store rankings. The more popular you get, the higher you get in the rankings, and the more people see you as a result. But Facebook is working on a new version of its popular iPhone app, and it could provide a new way for any iPhone app … Continue Reading
IQ Engines, Aloqa win MobileBeat Tesla awards
The winners of MobileBeat 2009′s second round of Tesla Awards are innovative startups. One has built an object recognition system and the other a location-awareness service that delivers targeted content for publishers and advertisers.
IQ Engines, winner of the judges’ vote for the most innovative entry, is the product of a small team of computational neuroscientists from Berkeley. The technology attempts to work somewhat like the human brain’s vision system to recognize images and objects. … Continue Reading
MobileBeat: AppStoreHQ and Touchnote declared best mobile services
The judges and attendees at our MobileBeat 2009 conference in San Francisco have spoken, and from seven presenters (not to mention the more than 100 startups who applied), they have selected the two best service mobile startups, who receive the MobileBeat Tesla Award: AppStoreHQ , a service that helps you find and learn more about applications in Apple’s App Store, and Touchnote , which wants to help other applications add a feature for printing photos.… Continue Reading
MobileBeat: Seven startups making cool mobile apps
The second half of the startup competition at our MobileBeat 2009 conference in San Francisco is starting now. This morning, a group of companies presented a range of mobile services; now, seven more companies (selected from hundreds of applicants) are presenting a number of cool mobile applications.
Here are the companies, what they do, and the news they’re announcing on-stage:
Aloqa tells you about events and friends around you, based on your location. Unlike many … Continue Reading
MobileBeat: Listen to panels on mobile investing and marketing
Stitcher has posted two more audio recordings of our MobileBeat 2009 panels. Here’s the links to our panel on venture capitalists and strategic investors discussing Where’s the ROI? What’s Not Working? (above) We also have an audio recording of our fireside chat on Taking Mobile Marketing Mainstream. (Pictured below).… Continue Reading
MobileBeat: Taking mobile marketing mainstream
“Nobody ever got fired for buying TV,” our panelists agreed, yet mobile video traffic is catching up to mainstream television, with traffic growing 30 percent per month at some sites. Mobile traffic is becoming easier to track in detail than PC traffic, with location and user data spelled out in higher detail.
Mobile marketers will need to figure out their customers are really doing. A significant fraction of Google requests are navigational, our panel agreed, … Continue Reading
